From Katherine, the coach took us along the Stuart Highway for another couple of hours until we broke for lunch in a little town called Pine Creek which is situated conveniently on the turnoff for Kakadu National Park.

Now, you might think that once in a blue moon it would be possible to turn up in a small Australian town and find everything to be perfectly normal rather than ever so slightly odd in that peculiarly Australian way. But no, even Pine Creek has to have something which makes you do a double-take. The entire town has a population of six hundred, actually quite a lot compared to many of the towns we have passed on the journey North, and somebody seems to have let this go to their head - when we arrived, we all piled into the local cafe and were astonished to find a big sign on the wall naming it as the Hard Rock Cafe, Pine Creek! This, I think I can safely say, is not one hundred percent official - but I can always tolerate delusions of grandeur if they make me laugh!

From our lunch stop, we continued to drive all afternoon until we entered Kakadu National Park - an area of nearly twenty thousand square kilometres which is jointly maintained by its traditional Aboriginal owners and the government. At the moment, unfortunately, most of the area appears to be underwater, and this made for an interesting and slightly scary journey pretty much from the point where the coach left the main highway and entered the park. Most of the sealed roads are totally flooded, sometimes to a depth of a metre. Where the water was shallower and we could pass, we were driving through soft mud and water was up to the level of the coach doors and flooding the floor - we had to either drive through slowly or speed through with the coach rocking from side to side, and only our coach captain seemed to know the secret formula which allowed him to determine which of these would avoid us sinking on any particular road.

To make things worse we were booked to go on a two hour cruise of the Yellow Waters Billabong at 4.30, and by the time we got to the ticket office the skies had opened up and we were in the middle of another tropical storm. This time, the rain was so heavy that we couldn't even see clearly through the windows - the windscreen wipers were thrashing wildly but having little effect. Essentially, we were driving through three feet of water in zero visibility and just crossing our fingers that we were still on the road.

Luckily, our coach captain managed to perform a minor miracle and made it to the ticket office which turned out to literally be the last building on a road which then vanished into an extended lake which used to once be a car park. We parked the coach in a position where we could easily leap into the adjacent cafeteria, and waited for a few minutes until the rain had stopped so that we could have a look around and assess the situation. As it turned out, the storm had actually worked to our advantage - since the lake had risen so much because of the floods, we were able to board our boat from the back of the ticket office rather than having to drive a further five kilometres down the road to the normal wharf. Despite the weather and the lack of any solid surfaces for miles in any direction, the staff at Kakadu weren't letting anything get them down and helped us on board the boat so that we could begin what turned out to be a surprisingly good cruise.

The floods had raised the water level by so much that we were able to take a leisurely sail around the car park and take photos of all the keep left signs floating past. The cruise lasted around two hours, and I got the distinct impression that the boatman was the sort who would finish a job if it killed him - despite several suggestions that he could turn back if he wanted, he just kept insisting that he'd seen much worse. During those two hours, I think I must've seen just about every species of birdlife known in this country - every few yards, the guide would stop the boat and point excitedly into a tree where a tiny pair of eyes would indicate that something was sheltering from the rain. It's a shame we didn't see any crocodiles which I was particularly looking forward to, but you can't have everything.

Tonight, we are staying at the Kakadu Holiday Village. This would normally be quite satisfactory, except that on the way over here we stopped off to look at the Jabiru Holiday Inn which has actually been built to look exactly like a crocodile, so it doesn't seem quite like they've made the effort.

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.