Time to start my Top End adventure, I fly on to Darwin, arriving early afternoon in the middle of a big rainstorm – oh well, it is that season between the wet and the dry so anything could happen. Arriving at the Travelodge Mirambeena, I set about packing what I need to take on the three day trip to Kakadu and Katherine Gorge. Mozzie repellent and walking shoes packed I set the alarm for the ungodly hour of 5am – early starts were to be a feature of the next three days. A long drive down the Arnhem Highway finally gets us to the entrance of the park. The roads are long and straight with very little traffic apart from the odd road train. The main highway is open now as it is the end of “The Wet”. It generally stays open during it but in wet wets, even this can close. But still at this time of year a lot of the smaller roads are closed off. The amount of water that falls here during the season completely transforms the landscape and it only slowly recedes from March onwards, leaving isolated pools called Billabongs – and I always thought that was just a trendy line of surf gear… But the tides here travel miles inland and often leave saltwater crocs lurking about not only in the river system but also in the billabongs….
We take walks around Crocodile Dundee country where a lot of the film was made and see lots of rock art – i.e. 35,000 year old paintings done by the aboriginal people and not Andy Warhol…. We then take a boat trip to croc spot and manage to see three Salties – it was at this point I wished I had not chosen an outside seat on the boat - they are rather large…. But loads of other wildlife is on display – sea eagles being “bullied” in the air by whistling kite birds just for the sheer hell of it, Jabiru (a black necked stork) and loads of others whose names escape me. There were dingoes, wallabies and woolaroos – no kangaroos as they don’t live in this part of Australia. The river bank in parts looked like it had been destroyed by a nuclear bomb. This was a result of cyclone Monica in 2006 and the devastation is still very clear.
We stop for the night at the Aurora Kakadu – a strange place in the middle of the park which appears to be made of a series of green Nissen huts spread out around a pool and a bar that looks like it should be in a movie – bright fluorescent light, a pool table and not a lot of style. A bit like Butlin's on a bad day.... The rooms were fine but there was a bit more wildlife – on the way back to my room, the ground was littered with huge, very dead frogs – lying almost comically on their backs with arms and legs akimbo. Whilst the crocs hadn’t got me, I was now convinced that there was some kind of issue with the local uranium mine and we would all be dead in our beds….. But “no worries”, I woke up hale and hearty as planned for our early start the next morning and solved the mystery. They were actually cane toads which are a real pest here in Australia and whatever poison that had been laid out for them, they had taken.
