As my departure from Australia nears, the occasional person has asked what I'll take back with me to America, a question both simple and impossible. Perhaps it's only a fallacy of fiction that the endpoints and achievements punctuating our lives come gift-wrapped with some easy-to-distill lesson, some tidal change that will forever carry you in a new direction. I'm leaving Australia in two days, and still I cannot quite determine the net effect of these last 6.5 months.

I can say, though, with certainty, that I've had fun. That's not the sort of assessment you'd get from Emerson -- it sounds more like wisdom you might get from a sunburned kid leaving Six Flags -- but hey, what currency of emotion can better fill a day than fun? In Australia, I've trekked Tasmanian mountains and stumbled away from bush pub barstools. I've taken hikes along Uluru and taken rides in hyper-powered racecars. With the help of one 10-day visit from my dad, one two-week visit from my buddy Slater, and several thousand dollars from Rupert Murdoch's expense account, I've managed to visit five of Australia's seven states and territories. People tell me I'll leave Australia having explored its gaping, glorious spaces more so than most lifelong Australians. Then again, one of the guys who told me as much, co-worker John Geddes, has spent 55 years Down Under. He's never been to Adelaide. Never been to Queensland. He's spent two nights total in Melbourne. And he's visited Disney World four times.

So what am I taking back to America? We'll start with an inventory of those items easily counted. I'll return with three suitcases, filled almost entirely with clothing, shoes, toiletry items, reading material and micro-sized electronics. I'll return with one cricket ball, one authentic rugby polo jumper from the Sydney Roosters, and one cartoonish screen-printed tank top purchased recently from a pub in Cooktown, Queensland. I'll return with parts of six thorns embedded in my left thumb, a free memento from a psychotic rainforest hike Slater and I took three days ago. I'll return with a heightened coffee addiction. I'll return with a trenchant (and inconvenient) desire for relaxed company, long holidays and preposterous adventure; these are the hallmarks of Australia, the land of No Worries, a mantra whose only downside appears when you have to abandon it. In this country, as Slater noted, even the semi-serious ventures can make you smile. That bomb-sniffing dog you find outside airport customs? Yeah, a beagle.

Right now, Slater and I are in row 41, seats A and B, on a Qantas flight from Cairns (near the top end of Queensland) back to Sydney. This, I suppose, marks the formal end of his vacation and my whole Australian journey. We're both already deep under the clouds of end-in-sight melancholy. Slater has fallen for Australia, and most especially for Queensland, the state in which we spent the last 10 days.

Queensland, especially to those who live beyond its borders, is Australia's outsized frontier state. Everything there is bigger and wilder, more beautiful and more dangerous. In Queensland, savage rainforest ensnares the mountainside, which gives way to the silicon that blinds the beaches, which gives way to the reef that illuminates the water. As Slater said, in Queensland, a casual story you'll hear from a guy you've known for five minutes will trump the best story of a best friend you've known for a lifetime.

One serpentine-looking plumber we met at a low-slung pub in Greenvale, QLD, told us about a woman who was bitten unknowingly by a snake, headed out for a few beers, and ended up two drinks later dead on her barstool.

One seventy-ish man with tattooed forearms stopped us outside a national park hike entrance and for some reason provided the narrative of his defense against attack from a cassowary. To frighten the bird, he grabbed a fern branch, brandishing the greenery like some medieval knight-- though in his retelling, it was all dramatic arm-slashes through the air, and Slater and I walked away howling.

The state is so flooded by dangers that Queenslanders have no choice but to digest them as dark comedy. At one store, we encountered frame-by-frame photos of a snake swallowing a kangaroo. At one pub, we heard a story about a crocodile expiring on account of its desire to swallow a hiking boot, which lodged itself inside the reptile's mouth and prevented further consumption.

During our road trip -- a total of 1,277 miles, from Airlie Beach to Cooktown -- we spotted yellow diamond-shaped warning signs for dangers so exotic we struggled to guess the iconography (FIG. I). Here, the wrong kind of mosquito bite means a savage month-long illness. Petulant six-foot-tall kangaroos gut human beings. Farmers illegally dump dead cattle into the Daintree River, where crocs devour the carcasses. Those same crocodiles emerge onto the muddy riverbanks to sneak-attack feral pigs. Those same pigs use their horns to spill the intestines of bushwalkers. Those same adventurers drive down roads while facing the lingering danger of unfenced livestock, who've been known to demolish cars. And those same cars, when venturing onto those narrow lunar outback tracks known as "developmental roads," face white-knuckle head-on chicken games with oncoming four-trailer road trains.

In all, maybe the more conventional box jellyfish sting isn't such a bad way to go. You're passed out in five minutes, dead in maybe ten. (Of course, Queenslanders will tell you that some victims still scream from the pain after they lose consciousness.)

Tropical Queensland, though, is less a parody than a paradox. Coffee beans thrive here, unlike in any other spot on the continent. Farmers plant rows of avocados and bananas and sugarcane. Thirty of the world's 70 mangrove species flourish on one Queensland river, and the Daintree National Park -- the site of the hike that left my scars -- is home to more endangered species than any other mapdot on the planet. Things want to grow here; this part of the world demands life. Slater, at one point, even spotted a tree growing from the base of a termite mound, and when wood can sprout from the very headquarters of an organism that eats wood, the ironies are simply too twisted to sort out, but to say that perhaps no other place out there is so alive with death.

I am not writing this, by the way, merely to impress women (since I've survived!), though that is naturally a large part of it. From the time we arrived in Airlie Beach, Slater and I obeyed some informal ground rules that would guide our travels. Tourist-popular spots tend to be packed with eco lodges and group tour packages and little boardwalk strolls that allow for white shoes and quick photo ops. We'd have none of it. We wanted unmarked roads, unheralded destinations, uncertain trails. I reckon 10 days of that attitude largely explained how this trip became, for both of us, one of the most rewarding and memorable experiences of a lifetime. It also explains the distaste we developed for everything clean and easy.

Our basic itinerary is almost too painful to recount, just because it's all over now, and because the retelling will never convey the thrill of the actual doing, but here's the quick catalog. Last Sunday, we landed in Airlie Beach, a town of about 4,000 that caters to the grubby subspecies known as hostel backpackers and serves as a jumping-off point to a collection of islands just off the coast. Slater and I summarily spent two days camping, first on South Molle Island, then on Whitsunday Island. It all went well, and we felt like Survivormen, leathery and well-equipped with knives, hungry for adventure and spearing wild animals, and we maintained this ideal pretty much until the last night of tent life.

This was on Whitsunday Island, a landmass composed entire of national park, featuring a seven-mile beach (Whitehaven) (FIG. II) judged by those who know such matters to be the most pristine in the world. Let me confirm, by the way: It is. The land stretches in three lines of glimmering color, the juncture where a white-blue sky meets a white-gold beach and folds into green-white waves. When the sun shines overhead, as it almost always does, your eyes face the primary danger. You need sunglasses, so pure and reflective is the sand. During the afternoon on Whitehaven, I jogged almost the entire length of the beach, and for a stretch of at least four miles, didn't encounter a single imperfection -- not a shell, not a fleck of seaweed, not even a footprint.

But then night fell. Though the beach allows space for 12 campers a night -- one needs only a permit from the Queensland environmental department, obtainable for $9 -- on this particular evening, there were just two of us. Well, so long as we discount the company of poisonous green snakes, three-foot-long goanna lizards, and one bottle of Jack Daniels. (We encountered all three, fleeing from two and consuming one.)

That night, Queensland flexed its muscles. A culture of sandflies invaded the sky, turning our idyllic beachfront into some of the most hostile territory we'd ever encountered. These little insects buzzed around our heads and attacked every open inch of flesh. It was a torturous terror, really; we were in solitude, and we were defenseless. We covered ourselves in long clothing and buried our faces into our sleeping bags, but the bugs flooded every crevasse, even after the Jack Daniels finally put us to sleep.

When the sun rose, we realized that sandflies had stolen our vanity. My face alone was covered with about 50 red bumps. My forehead felt like a highway rumble strip. Slater looked at me and gasped. Even a week later, I'm stuck with bloody scars from the itchy bites. A part of me thinks it's all worth the price of a story.

In great discomfort, Slater and I retreated from the island and returned to Mainland Australia, where even the most fundamental comforts felt luxurious. Soap! Automobiles! Non-synthetic shelter!

We kept moving north, often spending only a night in a given town before moving onward. To Greenvale, a town of 300 with one pub. To the Atherton Tablelands, a propped-atop-mountains topography pock-marked with waterfalls and craters. To Cairns, where we snorkeled in the Great Barrier Reef, swam with sharks and paddled through an environmental underworld so energized that it almost felt unreal -- as if even an attempt to touch the coral would reveal the whole image to be a hologram, some fiction too bright for tangibility.

In our final days up north, we headed to the rainforest, a wilderness with no patience for men and their macho quotients. As one warning sign instructed, "If confronted by a cassowary: 1.) Do not run. 2.) Without turning, retreat slowly. 3.) If the bird becomes aggressive, place a solid object such as a tree between yourself and the bird. If nothing is available, hold an object such as an item of clothing or backpack in front of you and continue to back away slowly." Evidently, cassowaries cannot fly, but they can come close, sometimes using their clawed toes as weapons, "kicking with both feet at once."

The Daintree is subdivided into several touristy attractions (guided crocodile tours, for instance) and one absolute non-attraction, a deathwish-style hike straight up a mountainside, where even the terminology aims to discourage. You enter a place called Cape Tribulation and look for signs marking the Mount Sorrow Trail. Hikers here have been known to enter the thick rainforest and never reappear. As such, any ambitious adventurers are ordered to provide their names to a clerk at a nearby pharmacy, so if night falls and the hikers haven't reemerged, proper authorities can begin their search.

All national park literature begs hikers not to begin this hike after 10 a.m., because it requires six or seven hours minimum, but Slater and I headed into the entrance (which is almost impossible to find, on account of under-use) at 11. About 100 metres in, we encountered a wild pig. We thought about turning around; suddenly, the front seats of our Nissan Tiida felt like wonderful safety nets. But we kept going, deeper with every step into the tangle of malevolent, alien plant life. Fan palms (FIG. III) created an exotic ceiling that shielded most sunlight. Vines wrapped along the hilly path -- which was so thick that it hardly existed -- and most branches were criss-crossed by thorns and prickers. We needed three miles, and almost three hours, just to reach the top of the mountain. We needed three more hours to descend. When we emerged from the forest and saw the Nissan, we screamed with joy and hugged. Slater noticed the soles of his shoes had ripped. That night, we headed back to town, found a restaurant that served kangaroo and crocodile, and chatted up a girl from England who was traveling through Australia by herself. The idea of Home sent us into states of semi-mourning.

Chances are, returning to the US was always part of this deal for me. I didn't come here to escape anything. I miss my family. Life without familiarity is exciting as hell, and wonderful and refreshing, but difficult to sustain. That's why I'm ending my G'DFT blog -- which has been a privilege to write for these months -- with this entry. It's time to come back to the US, start a new job and return to that world of ambitions and consequences. In whatever comes next, I just hope to remember that fun itself is rich and legitimate, not just some allusion we're doomed to chase and never touch. Knowing that makes the world quite a delightful place to inhabit, reptilian dangers be damned.