It's a 100-degree October morning at the sweltering end of the Dry, and I’m barreling down Explorer’s Highway south of Darwin, the coastal capital of Australia’s Northern Territory. A roadside dial indicates that the fire danger is Very High. This is three levels below Catastrophic—not so bad. The landscape here alternates between conflagration and inundation. There are two seasons: the Dry and the Wet. The latter, a six-month period that can see as much as three feet of rain, should be arriving a few weeks from now. Roadside posts measure the height of flooding over the road during the Wet. The warning signs are higher than the hood on my rented 4x4. Nearly every truck on the highway has a precautionary snorkel coming off the roof to get air to the engine in a flood. Mine doesn’t, but that’s fine. I’m just glad the motorcycle plan didn’t work out.

Australia’s Northern Territory, or NT, is one of the wildest landscapes on earth, an area twice the size of Texas with one-hundredth the population. It winds its way for 3,400 miles along Australia’s northern coastline, abutting the Arafura and Timor seas, and reaches 1,800 miles down into the heart of the country, a vast desert known as the Red Center. When my wife, Jess, and I looked into the idea of a road trip, we planned to ride a motorcycle 1,350 miles in ten days, from the coastal north to Uluru, the ancient 1,142-foot sandstone monolith, also called Ayers Rock, that’s the geologic heart of the Red Center. But the bike rental fell through, and that’s a good thing. This is not a place where you need to manufacture action. At a gas station, the headline on the local daily screams, “I DRANK MY OWN URINE TO SURVIVE!”

As I steer the 4x4, Jess reads the insurance waiver on our rental agreement aloud. It denies coverage of the following: anything that may fall on the vehicle’s roof or get tangled in the undercarriage, and any damage incurred by hitting an animal between dusk and dawn. 

“Thrifty’s really covering its bases,” Jess observes. We head southeast, bound for the jungles of Kakadu National Park, passing the desiccated carcasses of cattle, wallabies, and buffalo hit by passing trucks.

SITUATED 130 MILES southeast of Darwin, Kakadu is twice the size of Yellowstone National Park. Its mangrove swamps, monsoon forests, and wetlands are home to 280 species of birds, 68 types of mammals, 120 reptiles, and 55 kinds of fish; its rock shelters hold some of the most ancient art on earth, 20,000-year-old Aboriginal paintings. During the Dry, most of the park’s creatures gather at billabongs, streambeds or pools that fill annually. After a miserable night of camping—pounding tent stakes into the ground was like hammering into a sidewalk, our single-wall tent managed to trap all the heat in the bush, and only an excellent Australian sémillon drank straight from the bottle brought any relief—we, too, make for the water. The Yellow Water billabong is a year-round network of floodplains, channels, and swamps. At a boat launch, Dave Darrington, a guide with salt-and-pepper hair and a fixed grin, beckons tourists. We climb aboard a 40-person aluminum boat and push off into the slow brown water.

Flocks of rainbow lorikeets hurtle past. A comb-crested jacana stilts its way across a skein of lily pads. Two big eyes rise to the murky surface, the pupils narrowing in the morning light. With a sweep of its crenellated tail, a 12-foot saltwater crocodile strokes alongside our boat, close enough to touch if you’re tired of your arm. Darrington informs us that these animals can jump six feet out of the water. Soon they’re everywhere, slipping down the banks and submerging like reptilian U-boats. The crocs were hunted to near extinction in the 1960s, but the population exploded after they were declared a protected species in 1971. Now they have the run of the place. A recent survey found 280 “salties,” which are larger and more dangerous than their freshwater cousins, in this billabong. 

Soon, two adults begin thrashing on the far bank. One breaks free and glides slowly across our bow. There’s a ragged stub where its right front leg was moments ago but no blood—a crocodile’s circulatory system can divert blood flow away from missing limbs. I ask Darrington how long a person could make it in the water here. “About 25 seconds,” he replies. 

The NT is a poor place for watersports. Saltwater crocodiles patrol the forested coastlines and can travel 100 miles inland along flooded waterways during the Wet. The beaches? Many are closed year round thanks to deadly box jellyfish, which can cause cardiac arrest. So you generally don’t swim here. But you really want to. The heat is visible, hanging in a thick haze.