We Hope They're Only Fish Nibbling Our Toes

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Today we’ll be heading thirty or so kilometres south down the highway to Berry Springs.

We pass a turn off to the Howard Springs Holiday Park. The only reference we've heard to Howard Springs since we arrived up here is as the home of a quarantine facility - the one they'll lock us up in if anyone suspects we've been in contact with a COVID case. We hope the Holiday Park and the quarantine facility aren’t the same thing and that the name's not just a feeble attempt to make the inmates feel a bit better about themselves. I think if I was running a holiday park in Howard Springs I’d move it somewhere else, or at very least give it a different name.

First stop is the Government owned and operated Territory Wildlife Park. We’re handed a map, and told that there’s a train that runs right around the facility every half hour. We decide to walk, which turns out to be a poor decision. The exhibits are quite small, but they’re all about half a kilometre apart from each other, with nothing but bush tracks in between. We're not quite sure why it’s so spread out. We start to wonder whether maybe the Government bought the land with a lot more exhibits in mind, but then ran out of money to build them. The bush walks are pleasant enough, but we soon work out that if we don’t use the train the park will be closed before we get half way around.

We wander into the "Nocturnal House". It’s almost pitch black inside. We think there might be some cages in here and some of them might even have animals in them, but it’s hard to be sure. We come to what looks like a faintly lit enclosure. We get excited - we see what we assume is some sort of creature moving around at the back of it. Our excitement is short-lived. It seems that the "creature" is one of the keepers, and the enclosure's only light because she's had to open a door to get into it. I don’t think any of the creatures in here would be in darkness all the time in their natural habitat, so we wonder whether perhaps they turn the lights on after all the visitors have left, which would rather seem to defeat the purpose of having creatures on display in the first place. I think we might be missing something here.

We move on to a path through a monsoon rain forest, a lot of which is on a raised board walk, some of it through a massive aviary. It’s spectacular, and a very pleasant stroll. Next cab off the rank is a billabong well populated with pelicans, followed by an aquarium stocked with a good assortment of turtles and tropical fish.

Next stop is another billabong, where we watch on as a keeper feeds huge freshwater stingrays and barramundi. I think we usually associate stingrays with poor old Steve Irwin, who died when an aggressive specimen attacked him and embedded its barb in his chest. These ones seem to be a bit more friendly; they come right up to the keeper's legs asking for food. I hope they're not just trying to lull him into a false sense of security. The keeper says that although he’s standing knee deep in a billabong, he doesn’t recommend we do likewise anywhere in these parts. We get the message loud and clear - as he says this he points to a statue of a large crocodile on the bank next to him. Well we assume it's a statue. We run into our good friends Peter and Teresa watching the same show. We reassure them that we didn’t know that they were going to be here today. I don't want them to start to think that we’re stalking them.

The train takes us past the water buffalo enclosure, but it seems that the exhibits have taken the day off. The park‘s very nice, but as we leave we question whether we’ve seen any actual animals. We've certainly seen plenty of birds and fish, and we think there might have been a snake in one of the dark cages in the nocturnal house, although it was hard to be sure. I suppose it can still be a wildlife reserve and have no animals…

Next stop is the Berry Springs Nature Reserve. This is a large picnic ground around a number of sizeable and spectacular looking jungle-surrounded swimming holes. We take a dip. I think we might be the only non-locals here. Everyone else seems to have a noodle to help them keep their heads above water; we're both struggling to stay afloat no matter how hard we try. Signs near the bank tell us that the risk of any crocodiles being in any of the pools today is "low". How reassuring; not. There are lots of people swimming, so if there are any crocs in here they'll have a smorgasbord of body parts to feast on. We both feel nips on our legs. We think they’re probably only small fish, but the croc warning signs are a bit too front of mind for comfort. Potential hazards aside, the whole place is extremely pleasant and relaxing. It’s clearly very popular with Darwinians. The car park’s full on this a workaday-Thursday, so we suspect it probably gets totally chaotic on weekends.

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