Northern territories - hot enough for ya now, Poms?

We travel on board the Ghan, the iconic Australian train that travels the best part of 3000km from the southern city of Adelaide all the way through to Darwin, in the process passing through some of the most remote, empty country on the planet. The Ghan is a sumptuous experience, a kind of mini-cruise on wheels where all your food and drink on board is free (as in, part of our very-sharp-intake ticket price) and the scenery tho desolate is often breathtaking. You encounter some very interesting people, like Bob, a retired particle physicist with an encyclopaedic knowledge of just about everything who confided he used to keep a box of depleted uranium under his desk at work...

The Ghan also turns out to be a time-machine, offering an un-asked for glimpse into the not so distant future. The average age of passengers on board has to be 70, with quite a few much older than than that. No problem in itself, but what is slightly depressing is that when we disembark to do the various off-train excursions in Alice Springs we found ourselves apparently morphing into generic Old People -  young woman at a coffee stop offering to carry our drinks for us, and, worse still, the guy at the reptile house going out of his way to see us across a busy (as in, one car per hour) road.

Meanwhile the weather is getting its act together. Leaving Adelaide it was 28c, in Alice the gauge was nudging 36, and by the time we made our penultimate journey stop in  Katherine the day temp was scheduled to hit 40c. It's getting very, very hot, and that's the way it is when we finally reach Darwin after two days and nights on board. We weren't expecting a lot of Darwin - just a launch pad for our Kakadu trip - but find we like it a lot. On Christmas Day 1974 Darwin was al but totally destroyed by cyclone Tracey, meaning that what is here now is almost all new - a young, funky city of about 110,000 people that feels like it has as much in common with tropical South East Asia as the rest of Oz. It's also unique in that, in Feb 1942, the same Japanese attack force that had bombed Pearl Harbour launched a raid  on the city and oil installations at the port of  Darwin - the start of an assault on the Northern Territory that lasted some 21 months and to date the only ever recorded external attack on mainland Australia. Walking out of our hotel one morning, we happened by total coincidence to find ourselves, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, witnessing the service  of remembrance on on the lawns in front of the war memorial - a small poignant moment.

The planned highlight of our stay up here was the trip to Kakadu - the vast area of national park deep in the outback beyond Darwin. The trip centred on a visit to some aboriginal rock-art sites and, before that, a wee cruise on the Mary river; allegedly the most croc-infested waters in all Australia with some 50 crocs per kilometre of wet stuff. Unlike those in Katherine gorge (the mini-cruise we'd done as one of our excursions from the Ghan) these were not freshwater but the much more dangerous saltwater animals, top of the food chain and they know it. We certainly saw plenty, and at close quarters, during the hour or so we were out. It's all perfectly safe, of course, so long as you follow some basic rules, such as remembering that the kangaroos in Cleland wildlife park in Adelaide are cute; they will feed out of your hand. The crocs in Kakadu are not cute. They will feed off your hand (and probably your arm, too.)

As well as some hefty reptiles we also caught views of a huge variety of exotic bird life, making Kakadu a truly special place to visit. Inevitably we spent a huge proportion of the long day sitting on a coach, but that's the deal - the scale of everything here is vast. It's also very much a case of catch it while you can. Kakadu has been there forever and it's easy to imagine it will be there forever, too, but it won't. Current forecasts on rising sea levels suggest that in 40 years the waters in the park will run salt, and then Kakadu will start to die.