I didn’t get acquainted with languid road trips until my fourth decade. Somehow, I’d missed the memo that the open road is an open invitation. Take it. Run. Go.

I’ve been busy making up for lost time ever since.

Recently, I snatched an opportunity to spend two weeks with my partner along the Savannah Way – that dusty red ribbon across northern Australia. Our journey traced half the route and we travelled the Northern Territory Top End section between Cairns (Gimuy) and Darwin (Garramilla). A stretch that’s harsh and gentle, ancient and immediate. I can’t think of a time when my soul has been more swollen with Australia’s beauty.

To travel the Savannah Way is to understand our country through its resilience. Under infinite vistas and amidst the vast landscape, it grips you by the shoulders, points at the sky and the dirt and the water and says, ‘This is how the world began.’

Experiencing isolation and local cultures alike, you’ll understand how the Way asks patience and resolve of its travellers. But it gives back in spades, too.

There’s Borroloola, a remote community where the fishing boats meet theMcArthur River, and the stories of the Yanyuwa people trace deep connections to Sea Country.

In Pungalina-Seven Emu Wildlife Park, it feels like we’ve (blissfully) slipped off the map. Silence is pocked with bursts of feathered warbles and the rustle of wind through paperbark and dry brush. The air tastes of the eucalypts.

And at Nitmiluk National Park, once known as Katherine Gorge, we slip into another rhythm, and it’s one that belongs to the land versus the clock. Paddling along the river passage, the slender waterway is a mirror reflecting the towering sandstone walls on either side of it. Crocodiles leave tracks on the banks and birds echo one another in a language we can’t begin to understand.

The further I travel, the more I realise the Savannah Way doesn’t simply cut through the landscape. Rather, it forms connections between people and places, so your journey becomes a rich, multi-layered story. Indigenous wisdom isn’t something to observe from a distance; it’s something to experience first-hand, and is what shaped this pocket of wilderness in the first place.

The land remembers the ceremonies, the fires, and the footsteps. Rock art in sandstone shelters serves as both a guidebook and a reminder, bridging the gap between present and ancient past. I’ve never felt so small.

And then, there are the towns. Here, locals speak of cattle drives and lives eked out where storms redraw the terrain in a single afternoon. They tell how this corner of Australia became home. A teacher who came for a year and found herself still there twenty years later. A miner who never left. A stockman who can read the sky like a textbook.

The Savannah Way isn’t polished or pristine, and sometimes it’s washed out altogether in the wet. But when you travel slowly, it shows its hand: ghost gums at sunrise and billabongs flashing silver around the bend.

Out here, the road disappears into the stars at night, and its gift is to make you feel infinitesimal – and infinite.