London to Sydney by bus

'Humans should learn from crocs. Slow down. Take it easy. Stay in the shade. And drink lots of water'
Jumping crocodile, Australia
Happy snap ... an Australian river croc. Photograph: Anita Sethi

Splash! A croc jumps into the air, its teeth bared, and chomps into the piece of meat dangling before it. Gulp. "What a beautiful jump!" wheezes the boat captain on the Jumping Crocodile cruise along the Adelaide River near Darwin, home of saltwater crocodiles galore. "A big croc, too. Big enough to eat you whole. You wouldn't stand a chance, they're killing machines." Killing machines, but chilled out too.

"Fair dinkum, we humans should learn from the lives of crocs," he says. "Slow down. Take it easy. Stay in the shade. And drink lots of water. Crocs Darwin to Uluru don't do much at all when it's hot. And it doesn't get much hotter than this."

Those four crocodile lifestyle commandments are not the philosophy governing our motley crew of travellers. Slow down? Speed is all, for we're on a mission to get from Darwin to the Sydney Opera House. Time remaining: one week. Kilometres remaining: 7,000. The dizzying pace is too fast for four OzBusers, who decide to leave us in Darwin to make their own leisurely way across Oz by campervan.

The bus rolls on relentlessly through the vast outback, along the Stuart Highway, past great wedge-tailed eagles swooping at their prey on the road right before us, red earth, lagoons, squashed kangaroos, along the desolate path past the site of the Falconio murder to Uluru.

Take it easy? I guess we do, for one night only, in the sleepy Daly Waters
where t here is nothing but a gas station, golf course, old town jail, the delightful pub which houses us for the night, the tree where the explorer John McDouall Stuart apparently carved his initial 'S' in 1862, and Australia's most remote traffic light.

Stay in the shade? Ha! With reports of ground temperature reaching 62C, shade won't help us. In any case, there's far too much to do in the raw light of day. Clamber over the Devils Marbles, for one, where our Australian tour-guide, Mark, etches overlapping globes into the scorching sand with a stick, attempting to explain Aboriginal dreamworld philosophy, the genesis of craters, volcanoes and granite. Sadly, most of the knowledge flows in one ear and leaks through the other as I struggle to stop myself melting. There's also the Tropic of Capricorn to walk over, where Mark gives a geological lesson demonstrated by use of an apple raised aloft. "Here, we have a piece of the world," he says at the end and I greedily gobble up the earth.

Drink lots of water? Drink, perhaps. Our bus seems magnetically attracted to every Bottle Shop in Oz. But it is not, I promise, the effect of drink when I see Homer Simpson sleeping on the earth. The Olgas (Kata Tjuta) rocks are known to look unnervingly like the cartoon character. Soon, Uluru is in sight. Coachloads of tourists pop champagne corks near the wondrous rock. Our group kicks a soccer ball around. The sun sinks. Homer is buried in darkness. I leave you with this week's fascinating fact: if you weighed all of the world's termites (Oz has many), together they would weigh more than all of the world's human beings.

See ya later, alligators.