Crowd-free and spectacular: The Top End’s off-season is wet and wild

I’m dripping. With sweat or rain, I can’t be sure. It’s steaming hot, and I’ve been dripping since the minute I opened the car door. It’s been bucketing – these downpours are like the gods have upended a sink on the world. The earth is dry one second, soaked the next. Welcome to the Northern Territory during the wet season, I guess.

Clambering over gravel and loose rock, I make my way along the trail towards the Upper Cascades in Litchfield National Park, one of the few swimming holes open year-round in the Northern Territory. The wet season also means crocodiles find new homes in this area’s creeks and pools, so many are closed off as the rain rolls in. But ask around and you can discover where the locals cool off safely.

A word of warning: the NT does hiking differently – as in, chaotically. If you’re tired of sensible, graded paths and predictable bush walks, this is the place to be. It’s rugged and wild, signposted but in minimalist fashion, little arrows directing you on your way that are so subtle you’ll forget you’re following a guided walk and not choosing your own adventure.

I’ve been to the Upper Cascades before, but that was during the dry. Then, it was a series of small, shallow pools. Now, as I arrive at the peak, it’s a free-flowing river, the pools interconnected as one spills into the next.

During the dry, groups of tourists and locals communed in each pool, small Eskies set up beside them packed with beers, conversations at a constant hum. Now, it’s empty on a Saturday afternoon, except for two other groups, definitely locals – their Akubras have actually seen red dirt and are sun-bleached and moulded to their heads. I sit, catching my breath, surrounded by roaring water, birdsong, the distant rumble of thunder. It could be 2026 or millennia ago. Such is the way in the Northern Territory; finding yourself in a landscape that feels untouched by modernity is easy to achieve.

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Yet many visitors skip the Top End during the wet. The well-worn grey nomad path sees thousands of caravan enthusiasts meandering north for a June arrival, when the glorious dry season sees the area rain-free and temperate, with warm days, cool nights and all the bucket-list spots open for business.

But they are seriously missing out. In the dry, you won’t find yourself rushing outside under your caravan awning to watch the clouds roll in and lightning snaking across the sky. You won’t get to see a downpour start 50 metres away, then a curtain of rain rushing toward you before it bursts with such force that you won’t be able to hear yourself think for 15 minutes.

You won’t have waterfalls entirely to yourself, free from the selfie sticks. In the wet, the landscape is bursting with new life, blindingly green; the air is full of birds conversing, the ground hosting critters from tiny frogs to fluffy grey wallabies.

“But you can’t swim” is usually the argument to counter all that travelling joy. That, and complaints about the humidity, which is, to be fair, impossible to get used to. But you do learn to battle through.