Kakadu is Australia’s largest national park, located in the Top End of the Northern Territory, 250 kilometres west of Darwin. The park covers almost 20000 square kilometres of savanna woodlands, monsoon forests, wetlands, and the Arnhem Land sandstone escarpment, which Aboriginal people have continuously inhabited for more than 40000 years.

On top of the various habitat types found in the park, the stone country boasts some of the continent’s most fascinating Aboriginal rock art dating back 20000 years. Traditional ownership of the land is held by the local Aboriginal peoples, the Bininj/Mungguy, but by jointly managing Kakadu as a national park with Parks Australia, they’re making their home, including some world-renowned art sites accessible to visitors.

These natural and cultural values were internationally recognized when Kakadu was awarded World Heritage site status in three stages in the 80s and 90s, however when we first entered the park from the south, I didn’t appreciate all that Kakadu offers.

I guess I was overcome by what I perceived as a treacherous and hostile country full of crocs, snakes, spiders, and hordes of sticky flies, not to mention the suffocating, sweltering heat that sent beads of sweat to ceaselessly trickle down my back. Or maybe my initial unease was owed to the shocking story a friend told me a few years back. It was her answer to my question of whether she’d ever been to Australia.

Instead of simply replying that she hadn’t, she told me about the deadly crocodile attack on her friend in Kakadu. The incident dates back twenty years now, but our guide on the Yellow Water Cruise still mentioned the German tourist who died in Sandy Creek billabong. The very place we set up camp on our third night in the park, well away from the yellow crocodile warning signs surrounding the billabong.

Crocodile attacks in Australia happen regularly, but few are fatal. When adventurous fishermen, who insist on fishing in crocodile-infested waters, standing knee-deep in water on the banks of a murky river despite large signs vividly warning of the dangers, are attacked, it’s certainly a tragedy. But you do wonder if barramundi is worth the risk.

A different sort of tragedy unfolded when in 2002, a group of tourists in their early to mid-twenties signed up with Gondwana Adventure Tours for a tour of the Northern Territory. Kakadu was on their itinerary, and when their guide insisted it was safe, they went for a dip in the dark, and my friend’s friend died.

As I stood well away from the water’s edge at Sandy Creek billabong, I was stunned that someone would voluntarily jump into a croc-infested waterhole in the dark. But then I once crawled into a small cave in the Namib Desert for a weird early Christmas celebration on an overland Africa tour, despite my fear of snakes, scorpions, and spiders. I did it for all the wrong reasons: peer pressure, misplaced trust in a guide I hardly knew, a cold-blooded assumption that nineteen others in the cave with me might mitigate the risk, and the foolish belief I would grow personally by overcoming my (ir)rational fears.

The guide got a three-year suspended sentence and was free to start working as a tour guide again. At the time, there was no accreditation of tour guides required in the Northern Territory.

As terrifying as the fauna might seem, the Kakadu landscapes were rather dull, or so I thought at first. When a display at the Bowali Visitor Centre provocatively asked: “Lifeless, boring, mongrel scrub?” I found myself nodding in silent agreement. After thousands of kilometres driving through the outback, the novelty of Australia’s Tropical and Subtropical Savanna Woodlands was starting to wear thin, and so was the unbearable heat between 10 am and 5 pm.

Only when I kept reading through the displays and reflected on the variety of landforms we had already seen and were yet to see (however lifeless and bland they may have appeared under the scorching sun) did I realize just how diverse this national park actually is. And we had seen it only in one season when the Bininj/Mungguy identify six different seasons in which the park appears markedly different.