After leaving Alice Springs in 2002, Eloise and I hopped on a plane and headed out of the country towards Fiji and therefore missed out on a chance to visit Darwin. When we returned to Australia the following year, we had a limited amount of time before moving on to our main destination of New Zealand and this gave us the opportunity to visit Melbourne and Adelaide in the south as well as to put things right by spending a couple of days in Darwin - mainly so that I could take Eloise to Kakadu and hopefully get to experience what the park was like when it wasn't several metres underwater. I had been telling Eloise for some time about how the Australians like to call just about everything a city and have a habit of exaggerating - on our previous trip, we had visited several small outback towns but none of them had claimed to be cities so, to be honest, I don't think she could really relate to what I was telling her. Cairns, of course, calls itself a city but comes across to visitors as more of a small seaside resort, but even that bit of pomposity pales in comparison to Darwin.

Now, don't get me wrong here. I'm not suggesting that Darwin can in any way be compared to the sort of one horse towns you drive through in the outback. It has suburbs, as you would expect from any large community - but those suburbs tend to be either groups of roads leading off from the town itself which have decided to give themselves a name and call themselves a community despite not really being one by any real definition, or satellite towns that are so far away and with nothing in between that they are really villages in their own right. The nearby city of Palmerstone is referred to as a satellite of Darwin, for example, although to anyone who hadn't been told this it would simply appear to be the next town down the road. Darwin itself is a small seaside port crammed around the harbour, and the entire city including the suburbs only has a population of 110,000 - not much more than a large town back home. When Eloise and I arrived at the coach terminal and began to make our way to the hotel, I found that I was able to point out virtually every building we walked past on the way and tell Eloise what it was, because obviously there just wasn't that much to remember. But it was when we had dropped our backpacks off in our room and headed down to the shopping precinct that Eloise's jaw really dropped and she couldn't help but say "You weren't kidding, were you?". The shopping precinct in Darwin is very reminiscent of the sort of pedestrianised squares you'll find off of the main road in small London suburbs - a few shops lined the sides of a square you could walk across in about 30 seconds, and a few more led off down a small side street. There was a clothes shop, a coffee shop, a Burger King and a KFC, and to be absolutely honest I can't really remember there being much more. Most of the shops were closed when we arrived, perhaps because it was a holiday or a weekend, or perhaps just because it was Darwin, so we pretty much just ate in KFC and then went back to the hotel. It was that exciting. There is a famous poem which you can find stuck on the noticeboard when you pass through the small outback town of Oodnadatta in South Australia as I did in 1995, and this pretty much sums up the ghost town feeling you can sometimes get when arriving in even so-called large Australian communities away from the east coast:

OODNA-BLOODY-DATTA

By Anon

This bloody town's a bloody cuss,

No bloody trams, no bloody bus,

And no-one cares for bloody us

In Oodna-bloody-datta.

Just bloody heat and bloody flies,

The bloody sweat runs in your eyes,

And if it rains, what a surprise!

In Oodna-bloody-datta.

No bloody fun, no bloody games,

No bloody sport, no bloody dames,

Won't even give their bloody names,

In Oodna-bloody-datta.

No bloody clouds or bloody rain,

No bloody curbs and no bloody drains,

The bloody Council's got no brains,

In Oodna-bloody-datta.

The bloody goods are bloody dear,

A bloody buck for a bloody beer,

But it is good - no bloody fear,

In Oodna-bloody-datta.

The bloody dances make you smile

The bloody band is bloody vile,

They only cramp your bloody style,

In Oodna-bloody-datta.

The best place is in bloody bed

With bloody ice upon your head -

You might as well be bloody dead,

In Oodna-bloody-datta.

Eloise and I took a day trip into Litchfield National Park, which actually wasn't underwater for once in it's life, and we were collected from our hotel in a small minibus which was already full of people when it arrived, so that people had to shuffle around in order that we could sit together. The driver was the epitome of the chirpy and slightly sarcastic Australian host and he spent most of the day making jokes, playing practical jokes on us at every opportunity and finding any excuse to chat up the single girls on the bus. At our lunch stop, he set up a table and laid out sandwiches for us before telling us all how we really couldn't claim to have experienced Australia without at least trying a Vegemite sandwich. Vegemite is a thick paste which you spread on bread or toast and is made out of leftover yeast extract from the beer brewing process - it's very much in the tradition of Marmite in the UK, except that Vegemite is much thicker and stronger. It tends to be only Australians and New Zealanders who rant about it as though it is something special, and everyone else really tends to turn their nose up at the smell without even trying it. The thing is, Vegemite has the same sort of consistency as honey, peanut butter or jam - so when invited to try some, most people have the tendency to just stick the knife in the pot, pull out a large gooey blob and spread it thickly over the bread as you would with these other spreads. This is a big mistake - the trick is to spread it as thinly as possible so as to just get a hint of a taste rather than a full force yeast explosion in your mouth. I have been familiar with Vegemite ever since my first trip to Australia, and wouldn't touch it with a barge pole, but unfortunately I didn't quite manage to register what was happening before Eloise had dipped in the knife and spread herself a nice thick Vegemite sandwich. It was like watching something out of a horror movie - everything went into slow motion as I saw Eloise raising the bread to her mouth with Vegemite threatening to drip over the sides, and I'm pretty sure I must've looked like footage of the six million dollar man running as I tried to warn her. But it was too late: the Vegemite soaked sandwich disappeared into her mouth, the chewing began, the smile vanished. Someone else had learnt the pitfalls of too much Vegemite.

A visit to Litchfield at the right time of year can be something of a massive swimming trip, with the guides shuttling you from one beautiful lake to another. At our first stop of the day, a short walk took us to the base of the Wangi Falls where a small flat wooden bridge with no handrails crossed the water. Our driver, still on full form, supplied us with slices of bread and told us that it was traditional for tourists to feed the fish. Something about the way he said this, and the keenness with which he seemed to want us to get as close to the water as possible and place the bread carefully on the surface told us to be suspicious, but nevertheless one or two young women took the bait and went over to the side of the bridge, tearing off small pieces of bread, crouching down and leaning over the lake to offer them to the fish. Well, it was like a scene out of Jaws. These fish, whatever they were, were not only large enough to have easily swallowed any of our hands whole, but they clearly felt as though they hadn't eaten for a month. As soon as anyone's hand approached the surface of the water offering a piece of bread, something large and scary would leap bodily out of the water, snatch it out of their grasp and vanish into the depths again, only the ripples betraying any sign that they had ever been there. The first time this happened, most of us leapt about six foot in the air and the girl holding out the bread almost died of shock. Even so, it wasn't something you could just watch somebody else do and then not have a go at yourself, so within seconds we were all crowding along the edge of the bridge taking it in turns to jump in the air as something attempted to make a meal of our fingers. It didn't seem to matter how many times you did it, the result was always just as startling - and sometimes the fish would hang about for a few seconds under the water for just long enough for you to think they hadn't seen you before grabbing for the food. It was unlike any sort of fish behaviour I've ever seen.

Afterwards, those of us who had brought our swimming costumes went for a swim in the lake under the spray of the waterfall. Our combined guide and driver was a little too keen to point out that there are lots of Saltwater Crocodiles in Litchfield National Park and that it's always a good idea to make sure you go swimming with someone smaller than you or with someone who can't swim as well, and we were never really sure whether he was joking or not. To be honest, there are usually signs telling you where you shouldn't swim, and I have to say that anyone who goes swimming in a beautiful looking lake which is ringed by large yellow signs depicting a swimming stick man being eyed from below by a hungry crocodile probably gets what they deserve.

Returning to the minibus, our guide set up a small table and we snacked on sandwiches again - apparently the staple food of tour groups. While we were munching away, he suddenly darted into the undergrowth and came back holding a snake - one hand grasping the body which was wriggling quite violently and attempting to escape his grip, the other clamping the jaws shut with two fingers while we murmured to each other about what we were watching in low whispers of admiration. Then, without warning, the guide suddenly yelled out "Watch out, I can't hold it" and threw the plastic snake into a group of young women standing nearby, who danced around in panic, screaming and shouting before it slowly began to dawn on them that we'd all been taken for a bunch of mugs.

At another swimming spot after lunch, Buley Rock hole, the crystal clear water was cascading over mini-waterfalls and Eloise and I were able to scramble over the rocks and bathe under the falling water. These mini falls divided two or three small pools, and we were able to swim between some of them or clamber over a few rocks to get to the rest - it was like having a small piece of paradise on which somebody had placed an assault course. In one area, Aboriginal children were climbing to the top of a large rock and hurling themselves off into the pool below before scrambling out over the rocks to do it again - this was probably one of the highlights of the tour for us, and we felt that it was nice to be able to see the local children enjoying what nature had to offer. They were obviously having an amazing amount of fun, laughing and joking with each other, and it seemed like a world away from standard teenage life back home. Unfortunately, I can't imagine many places back home where people would be encouraged to strip down to virtually nothing and jump off of high rocks into shallow pools of water - health and safety would probably object very strongly to that sort of fun.

One of the things I really enjoyed about swimming in Litchfield National Park was that the experience honestly seemed to be just one big adventure. Rather than just turning up at a large pool, stripping off and jumping in for a splash, there were plenty of places where it was obvious that visitors could almost go off on their own swimming expedition as though they were exploring the tributaries of the darkest Amazon - but without the piranhas to worry about. In one of the popular swimming areas we visited, our guide left some of the less adventurous members of the party to splash around in the main pool while he led the rest of us off down a small river which meandered off between banks of thick undergrowth. After swimming along behind him in varying depths of water for a while, we had to scramble out of the river and climb over a grassy embankment before re-entering the water in an overgrown rocky pool on the other side - clambering over stones and paddling through shallow pools for much of the rest of the way. It felt like more of an expedition through uncharted territory than a swimming trip, and we wondered where the hell we were going until we suddenly emerged back on the other side of the main pool where the rest of the group were waiting for us. Of course, none of them had any marks from clambering across rocks, or red rashes from nettles they had had to brush out of the way - but clearly, if you go swimming in Australia and don't come back with at least some sort of bite mark, broken bone or box jellyfish rash to show for it, then you just haven't tried hard enough.

In the afternoon, we were given the obligatory tour of local termite mounds, something that people living in the top end of Australia seem rather keen to show off. This time, rather than just parking up at the side of the road and ushering us off for a quick photo stop as on previous trips, we were able to walk around a large field of termite mounds on which a zig-zagging maze of boardwalks had been laid out. The ground underneath the wooden planks on which we walked seemed to be quite marshy, and handrails made sure that we didn't fall over the edge. At various points along the trail, a sign would tell us about how termite mounds are constructed or how old a particular mound was. The Australians are nothing if not proud of what they have, and it's quite difficult to go anywhere without finding either a sign telling you about what you're looking at or a local willing to impart hundreds of years of local wisdom.

After the members of our group who had never seen a termite mound before had finished standing in front of them and having their photographs taken by the driver, we headed off to Nourlangie Rock in Kakadu. This was somewhere so spectacular that I felt sure we would've been taken to see it on my trip in 1995 if it hadn't been in the middle of a flooded National Park at the time. Getting to the views required a fairly strenuous walk, so we left the coach with bottles of water in hand and followed the driver as he led us along a trail which wound its way up the well worn slopes to the viewing area. From a distance, Nourlangie seems to be just another large rock plonked down in the outback - something which would probably raise gasps from everyone anywhere else in the world but is pretty much par for the course in Australia - but as you work your way along the two mile circular walk to the viewing area and back, you see it from different angles and realise how picturesque it is against the backdrop.

The wonderful thing about Nourlangie and its surrounding area is that it all seems so remote - but the sort of remote which makes you want to pitch a tent and stay for a few days rather than the sort of remote you feel in the middle of the desert. All around, piles of apparently randomly arranged rocks are surrounded by tufts of grass or small patches of vegetation, water trickles along the occasionally almost dry river bed, and giant walls of rock rise up all around inviting the mountaineers among us to have a go if we think we're hard enough. Climbing ever higher on the well worn track, it is quite normal to turn a corner and find yourself almost hanging in mid-air, staring over the edge of a cliff across what seems like hundreds of miles of scrubland or vast forests of trees. On the horizon, mountains emerge from the heat haze and shimmer magically. Along the way, our guide would dart from time to time into a hidden cave to show us a selection of remarkably well preserved Aboriginal cave paintings depicting Kangaroos or disturbingly detailed examinations of the human body. Pornography has obviously existed since the beginning of time - and when you see chalk paintings on a cave wall depicting a man with a penis almost the size of his body, it's clear that vanity and narcissism have too. These cave paintings would usually have complex stories attached which the guide would relate to us, usually involving creatures that ate small children or monsters that created the world, that sort of thing - and just to make sure that we were paying attention, we would constantly be reminded in an offhand sort of way that, just five hundred metres away was the Anbangbang Billabong, where crocodiles were at this very moment lining up with knives and forks to make a tasty meal of us; and that this region was inhabited by the King Brown Snake, a thing which would kill you as soon as look at you. Isn't Australia a lovely place?

The most famous of the Aboriginal cave paintings in the region are probably those at the Ambangbang shelter, an area in which the local authorities have done their best to make the paintings accessible to tourists by building a metal staircase and viewing gallery which winds up the side of the rock face and looks strangely out of place surrounded by dense vegetation and dark mysterious caves and pools. The central character depicted at the Ambangbang shelter is Namarrgon, one of the main characters in the Aboriginal creation stories. Namarrgon, also known locally as "the lightning man", is believed to be responsible for violent electrical storms which plague the Northern Territories. Using the stone axes attached to his head, he strikes the clouds, splitting them in two and creating the lightning; by striking the ground, he can also create the sound of thunder across the land. Namarrgon, together with his wife Barrjinj (pronounced "barrow-jean"), produced offspring which grew to become a species of blue and orange grasshoppers called the Al-yurr (stay with me on this one) which, in Aboriginal legend, taught humans the art of language as well as everything they needed to know about creating a society to live in. To this day, so the legends say, the grasshoppers always come out early in the wet season because they know there is going to be thunder and lightning and want to look for their father. The paintings at Ambangbang are remarkably well preserved, protected from the elements by overhanging rocks, and show in explicit detail Namarrgon himself and his wife in the birthing position producing the Al-yurr - the guide described this all to us in wonderfully Australian style, saying "Barrjinj is the lady sitting underneath the big guy, in the not-so lady-like position."

One of the things I was really happy about was that our trip to Kakadu National Park concluded with a boat cruise on the Yellow Water, part of the intriguingly named South Alligator river system. As I've said elsewhere, the itinerary for my first trip to Darwin back in 1995 had included a trip to Kakadu, but this had been called off at the last moment due to severe flooding in the area - the trip would have included a boat cruise on the Yellow Water, which I had been looking forward to, but as we had already taken a similar boat trip around Katharine Gorge and spent a relaxing afternoon sailing around the car park which was several metres underwater, I had been pretty sure that we hadn't missed out on much. Nevertheless, I had returned to Darwin briefly on my solo tour of Australia in 1999 and taken the Yellow Water cruise, and it was one of the things which had left such an impression on me that I was really looking forward to doing it all over again with Eloise.

A cruise on the Yellow Water is a liberating experience, and one which I wouldn't hesitate to recommend to anyone. Sailing along on the boat, I really got the impression that we were being watched from everywhere by curious eyes. Whether it was on the banks of the river, in the trees, or under the water, something was observing us - we could've easily been floating down a river in the darkest jungle somewhere for the lack of humans and proliferation of every other creature all around us. If I turned my head in any direction, I'd find myself looking at something which was looking back at me - whether it was a peculiar long legged bird standing on one leg on a lily pad in the middle of the water holding a fish with the other, or a crocodile eyeing us suspiciously from the depths. The cries of birds in the trees was constant, and our guide clearly had some sort of sixth sense for where to look - she was forever bringing the boat to a stop in the middle of the river, putting a finger to her lips to indicate that we should be quiet, and pointing at something in a distant tree which looked to the rest of us like a leaf until it suddenly spread its wings and flew off over the water. A lot of the time, it was almost as though the wildlife was actually putting on a show for us - as we sailed past, a cormorant would just be plucking a fish out of the water and would then obligingly stand on a piece of floating wood for five minutes occasionally smashing its catch against the hard surface to make sure it was dead between long periods of watching us to see if we looked like the sort of visitors who would like to steal its lunch. Around the next corner, literally hundreds of birds would be crowded together on the river bank sunning themselves, their wings spread widely as though putting on a pre-planned display for us. Often, along the banks, we would see wild horses - brumbies - munching away, pausing only to look up at us briefly before deciding that the grass was far more interesting. Egrets, Jabiru, Sea Eagles and far too many other species of bird to name even if I could remember them - they were all sitting atop a pointy branch somewhere or hanging around on a lily pad waiting to show off for us - it was a real shame that we had to be on a boat with a load of other tourists breaking the silence with the clicking of camera lenses. Given the option, I would have rather hired a canoe and just made our own way through the reeds and lily pads exploring at our own pace - except, of course, that this would probably have been a sure way to get eaten by a crocodile.

Our guide was a lively young lady who punctuated her constant exclamations of delight at having spotted something else in a tree with extremely detailed descriptions of everything we saw along the way. We learnt, for example, that the Yellow Water Billabong on which we were sailing was just one part of a vast network of waterways which all connected into the South Alligator River system. The Aboriginal people, we were told, don't hold so much weight in naming each tributary and preferred to divide up the land around the rivers and name these patches of territory instead - the area around us was known by a name which I couldn't even begin to spell, and I was thoroughly surprised that our guide didn't get a standing ovation for being able to pronounce it. We didn't need any help to find the ridiculous amount of crocodiles floating all around us, although the guide still got quite excited every time she saw one - the saltwater crocs (or "salties" as the Australians like to call them) in the area are actually misnamed as they can live in both fresh and salt water, so locals tend to refer to them as estuarines. Believe me, whatever you decide to call them, there is nothing more likely to scare the pants off of you than looking over the side of your boat and spotting a pair of green eyes protruding from the surface of the water a few yards away eyeing you hungrily. I particularly enjoyed the lively description we were given of the mating habits of the flocks of egrets which we could see stalking about by the side of the river: "They've got a pretty eccentric mating dance," our guide told us, "they bounce around, flap their wings, bob their heads. The boys get all excited about mating and start throwing sticks up in the air. Birds are pretty cool sometimes with some of the stupid things they do. The male Sea Eagle catches a fish, takes it up as high as he can and waits for the female to come and grab it - then they lock talons, lose the ability to fly, and circle down to the ground separating moments before they go splat!

I think I'll just stick to "do you come here often" in the pub on a Friday night, if it's all the same to you...

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.