carried away

Northwest Australia's untouched Kimberley region, newly accessible via a Seabourn expedition cruise, is about as far as you can get from everywhere else. But for Erin Florio, the place's very remoteness is a testament to the interconnectedness of all things

- Erin Florio

The sun was burning high and bright on a pellucid morning off Australia's Kimberley Coast when I stepped onto Ngula, more commonly known as Jar Island. The dull yellow of sand and sandstone contrasted with the vivid blue of the Timor Sea all around me. At my back was a rocky outcropping where millennia ago the island's traditional land owners, the Wunambal Gaambera people, lay their dead. Before me, a cluster of billion-year-old boulders contained clues about how they lived.

As I passed through these monoliths, I saw that they bore traces of serpents and individuals in headdresses. At more than 30,000 years old, these paintings are considered the oldest figurative rock art in the world, though their age and significance are still debated. "The thing about the Kimberley," said Greg Fitzgerald, a guide on Seabourn Pursuit, the expedition ship on which I'd come to the region, "is that it will leave you with more questions than answers."

The Kimberley is one of the world's last great wildernesses. Humans have inhabited this territory for 70,000 years, yet it remains stubbornly untamed. Its vast, arid interior, which is three times the size of England, has never been successfully charted. Its 1.8-billion-year-old cliff faces, gargantuan waterfalls, and dry, cracked expanses-where you may come across a dinosaur footprint-feel suspended in eternal stillness, undisturbed by human history. The place's meditative calm is an antidote to the frenetic distractions of modernity and a major motivation for traveling to one of the most remote and isolated parts of the planet.