"Go on. Give the ant's bum a nice, good lick"

As our "initiation" into Kakadu National Park before we had our lunch, our guide broke off a bulbous green tree ant colony off a branch (wrong, considering what it was about to be used for), passed the leaf bulb around to each of us where we were to pick off an ant, hold it firmly in our fingers (and carefully because they can deliver quite a pinch) and yes, lick it's bum to taste an exceptionally strong, heady lemony flavor. A sort of outback apertif. Before I had more than a second to consider whether, given that I'm opposed to eating dead animals, am I all right licking a living one?--the bulb was in my hand with all eyes on me.

And I licked. And it was actually quite good. Although I am sad the ants lost their home just to have a bunch of foreigners lick their butts.

Kakadu National Park is listed a World Heritage site for it's oustanding natural and cultural resources. It's a pretty diverse landscape, with rock country, flood plains, and rainforest throughout the rather large area. During the wet season, a good part of the park is under water, making it a haven for fish, birds, and of course crocodiles. During the dry season, the waters recede leaving billabongs (ponds of still water) scattered throughout the landscape. It is speculated that when the first aboriginal peoples made it to Australia, they started off around the northern part of Australia (which was somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000 years ago). This makes Kakadu an important place for the aboriginal peoples, both for as their homes and for cultural heritage (the park has beautiful rock paintings scattered throughout which tell important stories. Since aboriginal languages are purely oral, with no written script, the pictures are an important record of a rapidly disappearing culture).

We started off in a billabong and river close to Darwin, where we took a river ride to see crocs up close. These guys are pretty amazing--they've been around for several hundred million years (to give you a sense, the first primates were around 60-100 million years ago, and homo sapiens came around about 200,000 years ago, so several hundred million years is a freaking long time for an animal of this size). What's even more amazing is how little they have changed through time--they got their body design and survival instincts right a long while back and have stuck with it ever since. Their jaws can deliver a 3000 pounds per square inch bite (the only other animals that comes close are the shark at 350 psi and hyena at 800 psi).

Because they're cold-blooded and rather large, they are smart about how they spend their energy. As an ambush hunter, a croc will lie in wait for hours or even days for its prey, sneaking up on it in the water (all you can see is it's eyes poking out, and it can easily be mistaken for a log), and in a quick flash, it's jaws open up and close down, easily snapping the bones of anything it likes. We were told not to get water from the same place at the same time everyday, as they watch potential prey and record its habits--if you kept coming back the same day to the same spot and a croc spots you, you could be its next meal.

That evening, we did a short hike up to the top of a limestone hill created by the landscape--parts of Kakadu are limestone plateau, and as the waters came in and receded over the past hundreds of millions of years, limestone deposits were both built up and washed away, resulting in the hills, cliffs, and gorges found throughout the area. We sat and watched the sun go down.

The next day, we hiked to Jim Jim Falls--first to the top (an almost completely vertical 600 foot climb, which wasn't nearly as bad as the way down when I thanked my lucky stars that I actually have a bit of arm muscle to haul myself down. Although it is now two days after the hike and I can't so much as sit on the toilet without being in muscular agony--I scared the poor guy in the toilet next to me at the hostel this morning when I howled in pain sitting down.). There were a few beautiful pools at the top that are completely croc-free where we splashed around before heading back down to the bottom (where crocs have been known to sneak in every now and then, but people still go swimming because they are fairly good about trapping and relocating the crocs that do make it in.)

Jim Jim is absolutely beautiful . Nothing else to say about that.

And our last day was a laid back affair--we learned how to play the didgeridoo--a traditional aboriginal musical instrument that is a long, hollowed out piece of wood (the hollowing out done by the termites), then plugged for holes. We spent the afternoon visiting another gorge and swimming some more before piling up and heading back. I spent about 20 minutes under a shower upon return to rinse off the combination of dust (since it's the dry season, many of the roads have turned to pure dust which we inhaled by the buckets on the way back) and the strange mildew smell from the swags we slept in every night (it was beautiful weather, so rather than sleep in tents, they gave us these large canvas bags with mattresses inside and we slept under the stars).

And now back in Darwin preparing for the next journey down to Alice Springs and trying to not either descend stairs or use the toilet too often.

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