Darwin simmered gently in the dry season, with just enough heat for us to spend a day enclosed in an air conditioned room. Sleep came easy; the humidity did all the work.

At dawn the next day, we made a quiet exit from the city and embarked on our next camping adventure. Along dirt roads and black ribbons of highway, we made our way to the National Parks in the Top End. Short and slender trees were charred by the Aboriginals, and they looked like witches' fingers clawing up from the resurrected ground. Termite mounds arched like the fins on a croc's spine, and roadhouses left to decay in the passage of time drew thirsty travellers into their dry and dusty corners. Black birds veered and banked in the sky as the bare sun tried to keep pace with us.

In Litchfield, reprieve, as we soaked the water below falls, only made wary by cold water and freshwater crocs. From Wangi to Buley to Florence Falls, we plunged into waters whose depths eluded our agitated feet. As we rose to the shallows in search for the comfort of towels, our toes would slip against rocks and fish until our dripping bodies were encased by the hollow and hallowed land.

Kakadu provided the ultimate release; a land without tension. We cruised in the Yellow Waters, where saltwater crocs dismissed us with sidelong looks and more birds that I could identify soared over the vast wetlands. The Nourlangie escarpment was where we stood with our hands behind our back and our heads tilted back to view intricate Aboriginal friezes in the colours of the earth. An art gallery where neutral walls were traded for rough sandstone. In Ubirr we carried ourselves over several hundreds of metres of rock strata to take in the floodplains whose grasses rippled as the wind combed through them.














And finally, on our last day, our backsides braved the rocky red road and we angled our ankles over boulders to be rewarded with a view underneath Jim Jim Falls. Its pool stared back at us at a depth of 30m, but its full power would only be felt in the wet season, when the path we took would be inaccessible and its depth would double. In the early rays on sunlight, as the water tried to paralyse our muscles with the constricting cold, we frogged our way directly beneath the falls. Overhead, droplets swung in seeming suspension before pelting down in ice-cold pinches. The rocks perfectly cleaved on every side of the pool towered like lithic sandscrapers, not the mere bit disturbed by us, nor by time.