If the East Coast is the backpacker trail and Western Australia is the ‘real’ Australia, then the Northern Territories is where it just gets Weird.

As if being ravaged by more lightning than anywhere else on the planet and being inhumanly hot and humid for far too many months of the year wasn’t enough, Darwin has spent most of the time since its foundation getting itself destroyed.

First came the cyclones, two of them, spaced just far enough apart to allow the city to be re-built before being blown down again. Then less than a decade later the Japanese flew by carpet-bombing it, and a short time after the post-war re-build was complete, another cyclone came along and wiped everything out again.

After the third cyclone, the evacuees all asked themselves: ‘are we dumb enough to live in Darwin?’ Lots said no. Many did not.

Not everyone in NT is barmier than Kate Bush in a padded room, however. Some have instead developed successful coping strategies to save them from going the way of the likes of Paul Ansell – the real Crocodile Dundee – who went from being the hero of a minor survival story to a crazy paranoid drug-addled thief, a seven-stone loon who sat on his porch taking pot-shots at strangers until he went a bit far, shot a cop and died in a blaze of bullets in a nasty incident involving more armed police than even Paul Hogan could handle.

The main way of dealing with the day-to-day in Darwin is much simpler – beer. Darwin’s inhabitants have evolved into champion beer-drinkers, with the city boasting a consumption per person per year figure over 50 per cent higher than anywhere else in Australia.

With this in mind, I decided the best way to see what Darwin was about (and what was happening in the cricket) was to go to the pub.

Darwin’s drinking dens and their associated denizens are a bit different from Sydney’s. Darwin bars are less Irish and Darwin locals are much bigger and much beardier. And they weren’t lying about the lagering. Twenty wickets and about the same number of beers later, my head was full of fascinating information about what makes Australia’s Top End great. Sadly, it was lost somewhere on the way home.

The next morning, I awoke with the fool idea that what my hungover head needed was a combination of heat, humidity and a hell of a humdrum town.

The city of Darwin looks much like you’d expect a city to look that has spent its life being blown over by big bad wolves. It looks rubbish. In between the bars there’s a temple, a museum and some shops, a lot of which sensibly sell all manner of trips out of town. There is also Admiralty House. Admiralty House is a very odd place. It’s a 1920s’ style tropical house built on stilts. It’s also apparently indestructible. When all edifices around were losing their heads, sides and foundations, Admiralty House stood strong.

Weird old clown-houses apart, Darwin really is all about the surrounding area, a big fat necklace of national parks.

The most famous of these is Kakadu. This is partly because it was the setting for Crocodile Dundee and partly because it’s just got a cool name. Kakadu is enormous and it takes a few days to see it properly. Guides are on hand to save people being eaten by crocodiles, although in 2002 one tour guide did exactly the opposite when they took a group out for a midnight swim in a croc-infested billabong and a German woman got eaten. The billabong’s now a tourist spot.

The park, like most things in the Top End, is huge, and caters for all your standard flora and fauna needs, housing as it does swamps, wetlands, ravines, heaths, savannahs, a little rainforest and as many birds as there are beers in town.

After Kakadu, there is Lichfield. Lichfield is the smaller, friendlier version of Kakadu. Fewer people go to Lichfield because there aren’t any crocs lounging around in its lakes. This isn’t such a loss. During the day, crocs only do anything when you chuck stuff at them, such as food, beer cans or small children, all of which are frowned upon by the authorities, who like to keep the fun to themselves.

Seeing big lazy crocodiles in the wild is a bit of a waste of time and seeing them in one of the big crocodile farms just seems a bit silly, especially when they’re not doing anything. A much better option is to pop along to the Adelaide River Crossing and join a jumping crocodile cruise. These boys are much better value for money. Wave some food over the side of a boat and some lively dinosaur will leap two metres out of the water to grab it. You don’t get that in Crocodile Dundee. My attempt to feed it a screaming child was sadly unsuccessful.

I had also planned to visit the Tiwi Islands – a couple of white-man-hating islands a bit north of Darwin – but a man in a bar told me not to bother. So I didn’t. I stayed in the bar instead.