As I brush past another meticulously woven nest of leaves, dozens of green ants scatter along my right arm and down the neck of my shirt, dispensing painful squirts of formic acid.

I reach across with my left hand and pick ineffectually at the marauding battalion. Then, instead of squashing them in a fit of pique, I draw each wriggling insect, bum-first, to my lips.

As I bite off its abdomen, a zesty lime flavour bursts onto my tongue.

It's not that our Australian Wilderness Adventures guides haven't been feeding us well on our eight-day Kakadu escarpment trek. Far from it; every morning they've been filling us up with porridge and each night fashioning dinners like beef jerky curry and creamy mushroom pasta from the campfire.

But now, three days in, the fresh component of our food - a 4½-kilogram share of which we have each been lugging in our packs - is nearly exhausted.

So, green tree ants, high in vitamin C and protein, and once a staple of the indigenous diet, have become my Kakadu "plat du jour".

This morning we are midway between the headwaters of Jim Jim Creek, beside which we've spent our first two days, and the Twin River, which will lead us to trek's end. Down south, where most of we seven hikers come from, it is winter and blizzards have dumped thick snow on alpine ski fields.

Here in Kakadu it is Wurrgeng, the early dry, the third of six Aboriginal seasons, reaching from June into August, and afternoon temperatures reach 35 degrees.

At 17 kilometres, today's is the longest trek. Yet, while walking with a 20-kilogram backpack is demanding, particularly if your training consisted of taking the long way around the lounge to the fridge, our route is generally forgivingly flat.

Once on top of the 300-metre high escarpment that forms Kakadu's eastern edge, we walk on the fringes of the Arnhem Land plateau, formed of sandstone and quartzite deposited by the ocean, 1800 million years ago.

Dissected by fault-lines, and rutted by creeks that run amok in the wet season, the terrain is too rough for roads.

So, while the plains below are busy with tourists, up here, off-track trekking with a permit provides the only public access. Our group is undoubtedly walking where few, if any, white people have ever set foot before, and that is largely thanks to our two guides.

Three years ago, 29-year-old Holger Strie from Tasmania and 26-year-old Brad Dean from the Mornington Peninsula spent 14 days "out bush" here, mentally mapping a potential walking tour.

They emerged, having had the most exciting trek of their careers, and have since worked closely with national park authorities to develop this adventure.

My sense of privilege at being here is compounded, on our first day, at a briefing with Anja Toms, a Kakadu National Park official, to ensure I won't pilfer and publish photographs of millennia-old rock art that no other non-Aboriginal has seen.

"Seems reasonable," I say, also consenting not to picture any morons swimming beside estuarine crocodile warning signs, lest it encourages others.

"Great," concludes Toms, adding, "start smiling now" of the journey ahead. Three days in and I am still grinning like an idiot.

I have been since I grunted up the 280-metre ascent behind Jim Jim Falls on the first morning. Since I looked down from the roof of Kakadu, over the tumbling falls' jumbled rock slabs and boulders to a beach below and our last sight of other people for days. I've been carefree, too, since leaving behind any chance of encountering saltwater crocs, the plateau being too lofty for them to climb.

I've been stupidly happy since immersing myself in the first cooling waterhole along Jim Jim Creek; since parking my thermo-rest, sleeping bag and mosquito dome beside an emerald pool sailed upon by monolithic rock ships, at "Utopia", our first campsite.

"Utopia" is but one overnight stop that has us digging deep into our collective lexicon. Next comes "Manyarra Pool", named for its proliferation of turtles, where we spread out among sloping white dunes that wouldn't look out of place in the Whitsundays. Then the "Melaleuca friary", so-called after its choir of friarbirds, and the sandy banks of a billabong where we divide camp into "Upper", "Middle" and "Lower Paradise".

It is only when we reach "Nirvana", another silky white beach beside a waterhole, on the penultimate afternoon, that we question our own rapturous nomenclature when we discover an East Melbourne bushwalking club already in situ, having commandeered the prime camping spots. Even more disturbing, after six days in the wilderness, is the sight of them stripping down to their wrinkles to skinny-dip in "our" pool.

How easy and yet how incorrect it is to use the term "wilderness" to describe this environment.

While it is remote and stony, it has been a home for tens of thousands of years to generation upon generation of Bininj and Mungguy people.

Everywhere we walk there is rock art; little, if any, of it recorded.

Down among immense rock outcrops split asunder by ferocious flooding, and up in shaded overhangs on mesas rearing from the plateau, are paintings painted upon paintings, like a mirrored kaleidoscope focusing the imagination on a time it can scarcely comprehend.

In any one of 70-odd galleries we see, there might be a life-sized kangaroo emblazoned over a fat barramundi beside hand stencils next to a goanna.

We see places that, with their sexual imagery, were clearly initiation sites and, on one escarpment wall, above bushes that mysteriously attract thousands of butterflies, stick-like Mimi spirit-figures that Aborigines believe were painted by their creation beings.

Then, in one rain-forested gorge, high on a bluff beside Twin Creek, is the most hauntingly memorable piece of indigenous art I have ever seen: the ochre image of a hunched, dancing skeletal figure, spitting blood at an unseen foe.

Seeing this art where it was created, on the Kakadu escarpment, feels like wandering into our open-air equivalent of the Uffizi and the Louvre.

Each day, Strie and Dean plot our course across the landscape using only natural features and an occasional glance at a topographical map.

Sometimes, following buffalo tracks between watercourses, the way is clear, at others less obvious, as we stumble through creek-side spear grass, wattles and spiky pandannus palms.

I end each day royally knackered, and having drained several litres of water.

I sometimes wonder what the bloody hell I'm doing packing up camp in the pre-dawn dark, hauling all that weight and sweating like a gorilla in a sauna.

I mean, who does this and calls it a holiday?

Well, Sydneysiders Michael and Caro Curtin, he of the Hawaiian-style hiking shorts and her of the ever-pertinent quip, do. As does Melbourne designer Kirstin Lowe and fit Sunshine Coast retiree Paul Sharp. So, too, Canberra couple Paul Kinghorne and Amanda Horne, the former choosing to celebrate his retirement as a high-ranking naval officer here.

The group bonds imperceptibly, glued together by our guides' people skills, shared in-jokes and wonder at the surroundings. Some terrain we pass through is so tossed with monumental rock formations as to resemble ancient ruins like Angkor Wat.

We don't see a cloud for the duration of the trek. Under warm blue skies every pool in Jim Jim and Twin creeks becomes a swimming hole, into which we launch ourselves fully clothed, save for boots and socks.

On the final two days we enter Twin Creek gorge, walking on rock layered and cleft by the waterway and, camping beneath a tall dark cliff, amid boulders scattered in the trickling river, a place we call "the Temple".

The next morning, we savour one more view from the crown of Kakadu, at the top of Twin Falls, before we descend past day-walkers imparting updates from "civilisation", including the horrifying news of MH17 being blown out of the sky. I'm of a mind to go straight back from whence we came.

Over eight days, walking 86 kilometres through Kakadu, one of the few places on the planet that's World Heritage-listed for both natural and cultural values, the clearest human resonance I've experienced has come in what I can only describe as ancestral whispers, emanating from the escarpment.

I've felt connected to the landscape too, in a way that's best explained by Aboriginal elder Bill Neidjie, also known as "Kakadu man".

"Walking is good," said Neidjie, who died in 2002, "you follow track ... you sleep, wake in the morning to birds. You feel country."

Having refused to don protective gaiters throughout, I'm left literally feeling the country across my legs, in my own gallery of scratches and grazes.

But while I'm sore from the exertion, I emerge invigorated and kilos lighter, thanks partly to those vitamin-packed ant bums, which, I discover, should be enjoyed in moderation, lest they deliver the ultimate Kakadu cleanse.

The writer was a guest of Tourism NT and Australian Wilderness Adventures.

TRIP NOTES

MORE INFORMATION

australianwildernessadventures.com.au.

travelnt.com

GETTING THERE

Qantas flies to Darwin up to three times daily from Sydney and once daily from Melbourne. See qantas.com.au

Kakadu is three-hours drive from Darwin, with Jim Jim and Twin Falls, this trek's start and end points accessible by 4WD only.

WALKING THERE

Australian Wilderness Adventures' nine-day Kakadu Explorer costs $2595 ex-Darwin and that includes eight breakfasts, nine lunches and eight dinners along with snacks, wilderness guides, Yellow Waters lagoon cruise and transport to and from Darwin. The next departures are in July 2015.