On the Bottom Half

The Rest of the Story and Kakadu

After 6 months, I was finally able to complete the journey back to Darwin! I got a steal of a deal with Wayward on their Territory Explorer 3 1/2 day trip - $99! Thankfully the tour was cheap because they only provided breakfast, and no other meals. At the full price ($230), I'd have felt a little shorted - you still pay a $30 kitty for 'camping fees, breakfast, and park entry fees' and an extra $10 for a fuel surcharge. Now, I may be wrong, but as a tour company offering motor vehicle tours to National Parks featuring camping, aren't those what I'm paying for in the tour price? Ah well, our guide was great and the tour was great, qestionable accounting aside. The Devil's Marbles (Karlu Karlu) were fascinating, Katherine Gorge and Mataranka were superb swimming holes, and Litchfield NP was one superlative swimming hole after another. These swimming holes are those ones that you see in travel documentaries that make you think - 'there aren't really places like that in the world, are there?' Also in Litchfield, there were 'magnetic' termite mounds. Now, they aren't really magnetic - they call them so because the termites build the mounds as tall, thin wedges that are aligned north-south. The early and late sun beats on them, but the hot midday sun can't. This maintains the colony temperature at an even 34 degrees year round! Smart little buggers, huh? Each one of these mounds can be over 50 yeards old and the queen of the colony can actually live for decades as well...

We got into Darwin after stopping at a place called the Digeridoo Hut where I figured out how to play the things. I can't yet do the circular breathing, but I can get the sound. I hope everyone is looking forward to hearing some digeridoo when I get back! I suggest ear plugs or something to distract you... But seriously, you can really tell the difference between the cheap didjs and the expensive ones - I like the ones that have this really huge sound - you try them out until you find one that sort of reverberates through your whole body and shakes the air around your ears... It's really a wonderful sound!

The next morning, I went on the Kakadu 3 day trip with Wilderness Tours. Being the wet season, the book says that the average daytime humidity ranges from 95 % in the morning to 75% in the afternoon... Couple that with full on equatorial sunshine and you again have a little puddle of Kyle flowing around the countryside. Silliness aside, the wet season also means that everything is very green and all the waterfalls are flowing quite strongly. It was lovely - we toured several rock art sites with some of the works extending back 20,000 years! It's something else to look at artwork that belongs to the Earth's longest surviving culture - there is dated history of Australian Aboriginal habitation dating to 50,000 years before present! Our caucasian guide was taken to an aboriginal community in the NT and abandoned by his parents when he was a baby. He spent the first 12 years of his life being raised by the community, then took off to work on cattle stations and the like before becoming a tour guide. With such an upbringing, he has an extreme depth of traditional aboriginal knowledge and knew a great deal about everything we looked at. He says that the easiest way to make sense of the culture is to think of it in terms of survival - they have lived for a lot longer than most other human groups. For example, they used smoke from burning ironbark lumber as a contraceptive in times of drought; their stories relate simple, but important lessons strictly designed to protect their children or themselves. If they didn't want the kids out in caves after dark, they painted a figure of what amounts to a boogy man, then told the kids that he catches and eats children if they disturb him after dark. Survival...

Speaking of survival, on the tour, we also did a croc cruise on the Adelaide River to find saltwater crocodiles. We ended up seeing 5 of them, one of which was a hulking male 5 m long! Incredible animals - you get nervous when the tour boat it sitting on the banks of the river with a 5 m long carnivorous reptile sitting serenely in its little hole... There was a very large swimming female that comes right up to the boat... Wow! Stuie a young male, then one right beside the dock that swam like a rocket over to the boat... Pictures coming up.

We also hit some idyllic water holes with waterfalls cascading into them, a la Litchfield..., two great cultural centres, and some hiking. You haven't sweated until you've sweated in this place...
That brings me today, a day that R-man would enjoy! - I went down to the docks this morning where every high tide is a fish feeding event. Thousands of diamondback mullet fish, 4' long milk fish, catfish, bream, and diamond fish come to feed. You toss them bread and they swim around and go crazy gobbling up the food! You can actually stand in the water with these fish schooling around your feet while you hand feed them... Cool!

Now just going to try book a flight to Cairns and hopefully go diving for a while.

Ciao!

posted by Kyle @ 17:25