Australia, Part II: The Northern Territory
Published on August 27, 2005
So, as I was saying, the next stop after Fraser Island was Darwin and Kakadu National Park. Kakadu is the largest park in Australia, covering about 20,000 square kilometers - I think we drove through most of them.
We arrived around 1:00AM into the Darwin Airport, bearing tons of luggage, and with nowhere to spend the night. Luckily, we scored an over-priced room in a cheap hotel downtown and slept a couple hours before getting up early the next day to gather supplies, pick up a rental car, and head the 200 kilometers or so into Kakadu
Our first stop was to be Jabiru, but we had to make an emergency stop to watch the jumping crocodiles. When I first saw the jumping crocs sign, I imagined crocodiles kind of bouncing down the shore line, kangaroo style. Turns out that you have to entice them with large chunks of pig, and it’s more of a fully-body thrust out of the water than a jump. Regardless, it was a pretty sweet show and we saw some seriously large crocodiles.
With the crocs out of the way, we headed on to Jabiru, which served as our home base during our stay. Jabiru is the thriving metropolis of Kakadu, home to well over 100 people, a bakery, a gas station, and even a community pool. During our stay, many thousands of fruit bats also took up residence in the town, which is great, especially if you want to get pooped on. We stayed in a fantastic little, um, hut, which was kind of a raised wooden box with a big canopy over it. It kept the bugs out, which is as much as you can ask for in Kakadu.
From Jabaru, we made trips out to Ubirr to watch what was likely the most beautiful sunset of my life and then further down a 30Km dirt road to Oenpelli, an aboriginal town that reminded me a lot of the run down towns you see when you drive onto an Indian reservation back in the US. Tons of dogs running around, kids playing in the street, broken down cars in front yards, that sort of thing. They do make some nice art in Oenpelli, though it’s not quite my style. I was tempted to buy a print of their Lightning God hitting a women over the head with a yam (he did this to daze them before eating them), but it just wasn’t in the cards.
Kakadu has some seriously remote areas - the kind of places where you’re the only person in the park for 500Kms, and if your car breaks down, you could be sitting on the side of the road for quite some time waiting for a tow. We drove through many of these places, often at dusk or dawn, when you have to be extremely careful. The roads are long, straight, and flat - conducive to driving fast. At these times, many of the animals of the park become active, and the edges of the road fill with dingos and wallabies, the latter of which seem to have a strange penchant for charging straight at your car. There was a large notice in our car rental place letting us know that is was an extra AU5,000 dollar fine if you hit a Wallaby, I guess i now know why.
We ventured to a number of other areas in Kakadu, saw lots of aboriginal rock paintings, did a fair amount of hiking, and even got stuck halfway up a mountain for a couple hours, all in all, it was a great time. Eventually though, we had to head back to Darwin and catch our overnight flight back to Sydney for a brief stay before heading home. More on that later.
Our first stop was to be Jabiru, but we had to make an emergency stop to watch the jumping crocodiles. When I first saw the jumping crocs sign, I imagined crocodiles kind of bouncing down the shore line, kangaroo style. Turns out that you have to entice them with large chunks of pig, and it’s more of a fully-body thrust out of the water than a jump. Regardless, it was a pretty sweet show and we saw some seriously large crocodiles.
With the crocs out of the way, we headed on to Jabiru, which served as our home base during our stay. Jabiru is the thriving metropolis of Kakadu, home to well over 100 people, a bakery, a gas station, and even a community pool. During our stay, many thousands of fruit bats also took up residence in the town, which is great, especially if you want to get pooped on. We stayed in a fantastic little, um, hut, which was kind of a raised wooden box with a big canopy over it. It kept the bugs out, which is as much as you can ask for in Kakadu.
From Jabaru, we made trips out to Ubirr to watch what was likely the most beautiful sunset of my life and then further down a 30Km dirt road to Oenpelli, an aboriginal town that reminded me a lot of the run down towns you see when you drive onto an Indian reservation back in the US. Tons of dogs running around, kids playing in the street, broken down cars in front yards, that sort of thing. They do make some nice art in Oenpelli, though it’s not quite my style. I was tempted to buy a print of their Lightning God hitting a women over the head with a yam (he did this to daze them before eating them), but it just wasn’t in the cards.
Kakadu has some seriously remote areas - the kind of places where you’re the only person in the park for 500Kms, and if your car breaks down, you could be sitting on the side of the road for quite some time waiting for a tow. We drove through many of these places, often at dusk or dawn, when you have to be extremely careful. The roads are long, straight, and flat - conducive to driving fast. At these times, many of the animals of the park become active, and the edges of the road fill with dingos and wallabies, the latter of which seem to have a strange penchant for charging straight at your car. There was a large notice in our car rental place letting us know that is was an extra AU5,000 dollar fine if you hit a Wallaby, I guess i now know why.
We ventured to a number of other areas in Kakadu, saw lots of aboriginal rock paintings, did a fair amount of hiking, and even got stuck halfway up a mountain for a couple hours, all in all, it was a great time. Eventually though, we had to head back to Darwin and catch our overnight flight back to Sydney for a brief stay before heading home. More on that later.