Best of Australia's Top End: Darwin, Kakadu UNESCO, Arnhem Land, Katherine Gorge, Litchfield & Aboriginal Heritage - A 2026 First-Person Guide
Browse more guides: Australia travel | Oceania destinations Best of Australia's Top End: Darwin, Kakadu UNESCO, Arnhem Land, Katherine Gorge, Litchfield & Aboriginal Heritage, A 2026 First-Person Guide TL;DR I have been knocking around the Top End of the Northern Territory on and off for years, and the trip that finally made the region click for me happened in the dry season of 2025, when I traced a slow figure-eight loop out of Darwin through Kakadu, dropped south to Katherine Gorge, looped back through Mary River, and finished with a short, permitted visit into western Arnhem Land. The Top End is not a destination you can rush. It is a corner of Australia roughly 522,000 square kilometres in size where the world's oldest continuous human culture has lived for at least 65,000 years, where saltwater crocodiles patrol almost every river and waterhole, where Kakadu National Park covers 19,804 square kilometres of UNESCO-listed mixed natural and cultural landscape, and wh...