Australia Adventure Grand Loop: Cairns, Kakadu, Katherine Gorge & Tasmania

At 14,000 feet above Cairns, before the jump, you can see the Great Barrier Reef below you like a pale green shadow under the Coral Sea. Fourteen seconds of freefall later, the parachute opens and the reef is still there — but now you're drifting silently above it, watching the reef structure resolve into individual coral heads and lagoons as you descend. This is the opening act of an Australia adventure circuit that doesn't repeat itself once in 10 days. From Cairns, the route moves north into the Northern Territory — Darwin as a base for Kakadu National Park, where Aboriginal rock art sites are 20,000 years old and the wetlands hold more species of waterbird than the entire UK, and Katherine for the Nitmiluk Gorge system where sandstone walls rise 70 metres above a river system that carved itself through 1.8 billion years of rock. Tasmania follows: Cradle Mountain at the edge of a wilderness that UNESCO designated as one of the world's last temperate rainforests, Hobart's MONA museum below ground, and the Tasmanian devil at close quarters in the wild. The Great Ocean Road closes the circuit from Melbourne, driven west to east into the sunset at the Twelve Apostles. This is Australia for people who treat a country's geography as something to be tested rather than admired from a bus window.