Northern Territory

Uluru is a single piece of sandstone rising more than three hundred metres out of flat desert, and photographs genuinely do not prepare people for it — the scale, the way the surface is folded and pitted and caved rather than smooth, and the colour shifting through the day. It sits in a national park owned by the Anangu, the traditional owners, and jointly managed with the national parks service. The base walk is the way to see it: about ten kilometres on the flat, close enough to the rock to see the waterholes and the painted shelters, and it takes three or four hours in the early morning before the heat. Climbing the rock is not permitted — the climb was closed at the request of the traditional owners, for whom the route has particular significance — and there are sections of the base where photography is asked to be avoided, marked by signs. Both are simply the rules of the place. Kata Tjuta, thirty-odd kilometres west, is a group of steep domed rocks and is the one visitors say they wish they had given more time; the walk through the gorge between them is better than anything at Uluru itself for many people, and it is far quieter. Sunrise and sunset viewing areas exist at both and are worth the early start.

Kakadu is very large, jointly managed with its traditional owners the Bininj and Mungguy, and takes at least three days to make sense. Its rock art is the reason many people come and it deserves the billing: the galleries at the main sites hold layered paintings made over an extraordinarily long period and still connected to the people whose country it is, with interpretation available from custodians and rangers. The other half of the park is water — floodplains, wetlands full of birds in numbers that are hard to credit, and saltwater crocodiles throughout, which is why swimming is confined to a small number of signed places and why the signs are absolute rather than advisory. The park is usually described by outsiders as having a wet and a dry season, but the Bininj and Mungguy calendar recognises six, keyed to what the country is doing rather than to the rainfall alone, and it is a better guide to what you will actually see. Practically: in the dry, roughly May to October, everything is open and the falls are reachable, some by four-wheel drive only. In the wet, the escarpment waterfalls are at full force and best seen from the air, many roads are cut, and the park is green, dramatic and nearly empty.

Darwin is small, tropical, and unlike any other Australian capital — closer to Southeast Asia than to Sydney in both distance and feel, with a population drawn from across the region and a food culture that shows it. Its year runs on two seasons rather than four, its outdoor markets are the social centre of the dry, and it is the practical base for everything in the Top End. Litchfield National Park, a comfortable day trip south, is the one locals go to: a series of waterfalls dropping into clear plunge pools that are monitored and, unusually for this part of the world, generally safe to swim in, plus fields of magnetic termite mounds standing like headstones aligned north to south. Further south again, Nitmiluk is a series of deep sandstone gorges on the Katherine River, best seen from the water — by cruise, or by canoe if you would rather work for it. And east of Kakadu lies Arnhem Land, which is Aboriginal-owned land: entry requires a permit arranged in advance through the relevant land council or an authorised tour operator, and that is the whole of the process. It is not a formality to be worked around, and going with an operator who holds the permissions is the straightforward way in. The wider protocols — permits, photography, and how to tell a genuinely Indigenous-led experience from one that merely features Indigenous content — are set out on First Nations Australia.

Alice Springs sits almost exactly in the middle of the continent, in Arrernte country, ringed by the MacDonnell Ranges — a long east–west spine of red quartzite cut by gorges. Those gorges are the reason to stay rather than pass through: waterholes between sheer red walls, several of them cold enough to be a shock and swimmable, spread along sealed roads either side of the town so you can take them as day trips. The Larapinta Trail runs the western ranges for around two hundred and thirty kilometres and is one of Australia's great long walks, done in sections by most people, in the cooler months only. Further out, a canyon with a rim walk climbs onto a plateau of weathered domes, and the drive south to Uluru crosses several hundred kilometres of desert that is emptier and more varied than it looks from a plane. Two practical points that matter more here than elsewhere: desert nights are genuinely cold, including in months when the days are hot, so pack for both; and the walking is rated by difficulty and closed above certain temperatures in summer, which is a rule rather than a suggestion.