Northern Exposure; Darwin - Alice

---

---

Could it be that we are nearly up to date with the blogs...surely not. We are in Sydney right now and are writing about something which happened only a matter of days ago. Miracle. We cop a lot of flack for not updating our blogs but there are reasons..we are travelling you numpties. To write we have to do stuff. If we are doing stuff we can't always be writing. You get me? That and the fact that every blog you read can take up to 10 hours to produce so less of the whining dudes....

So, what brings us to Darwin other than the teeny tiny microscopic plane? The Northern territory of course! 1% of Australia's population live in the Northern Territory, which takes up 20% of the country's area. It is hard to express how alone you can be in this country. We really wanted to see this place properly because most people only make a whistle- stop at Ularu if they bother at all. We are more adventurous than most (have you seen our last blog entry!) and needed to stay longer to see the whole thing. It took me time to persuade Lara that we needed to go to the top end, largely due to the creepy crawlies but when you are in the land of Croc Dundee what do you expect!

Darwin is the the most Northerly town in Australia and the NT's capital. It is still a bit of a frontier town, isolated from the other cities by vast expanses of inhospitable desert and is in fact closer to Jakarta than Canberra. It looks like a lively, modern place to hang but once we'd had fish and chips at the harbour and visited Sweetheart, the 5m salty (stuffed), at the museum there was not much else to fill our days with. I even tried my hand at crab racing in one of the odd little pubs and even made the final but Ian (my crab) shat himself and lost. The pressure got to him. Thankfully, there was brilliant sunshine all day and nightime tempuratures of not much below a balmy 25 degrees. Perfect for sitting on Mindil Beach (not a patch on Cable Beach but it had to do) then mooching Mindil Market in the evening where we sampled the huge variety of Asian food while listening to Didgeredoo drum and base music. We tried sitting by the pool in our hostel but soon got fed up of the pissed up Aussies at the bar and the pissed up Irish people in the rest of the place. Is there another potato famine in Ireland or something? They all seem to be in Darwin (or County Darwin, as we call ity now) pissing up their meagre pay. The hostel was, perhaps the worst in Oz yet. 16 person dorms, very cramped and the kitchen was a total discrace! Maybe the Irish don't know how to do their washing up or perhaps they like cockroaches, I don't know. Either way, we had insects in our beds as a direct result.

The best thing about travelling is the flexibility. You arrive in Darwin and can book yourself on a tour which starts the next day. Come back from that one and start another one the day after. Aaah the life of a backpacker so thats what we did. 3 back to back tours. We began our three-day Kakadu tour at a stupid 6.20 in the morning, being picked up from the shit pit in a 4WD troop carrier driven by a bloke with a nasty looking shiner, who introduced him self as Al. Oh good, a tour guide who would give children nightmares! First impressions of our travel companions were not too hot either, 7 pairs of slitty eyes peered at us as we boarded the truck. China obviously affected us more deeply than we had thought because we both suffered a flashback to those days when we were the main attraction to the hordes of Chinese tourists. We were wrong, though. Team Japan and Team Singapore (4 Japanese girls and two Singaporean guys and a girl) proved to be the most polite and interesting people on the tour. The Kakadu is Australia's largest land based national park and a World Heritage site. The landscape is so impressive the photos don't really do it justice. Basically, there a rock escarpments and lowland floodplains - in the wet season the lowlands are entirely submerged. It is dry season now but only 3 weeks ago you could not get around the park without a boat (something about a freak cyclone). There were still clumps of grass that the flood water had left in the trees.... 8-10 feet above the ground. Hard to imagine. Unfortunately, the famous Jim Jim Falls were still too flooded to get too. Nevermind, we still got to swim in plenty of waterfalls - despite the saftey warnings at every water hole (see the pics). We also got our first glimpse of a salty (not stuffed) at Yellow Water Billabong. "Billabong" is the Aboriginal word for "quality surf wear" and means there is always water no matter what the season. Hence, in the dry, when the creeks and lakes dry up, billabongs are chock a block with crocs. Mary River, where we had a nice boat trip in a worryingly flimsy little dingy, has the highest concentration of saltwater crocs in the whole world. We saw five or six on the banks, god knows how many were swimming around under water.

Perhaps more so than the landscape, rock art is a major attracion here. Kakadu has 5000 sites of rock art dating back 20,000 years. That's a bloody long time in human history! In fact it is pretty hard to get your head around the fact that 20,000 years ago dudes were drawing on rocks. They all have a story and a cultural relevence but, like the story of the Three Sisters in the Blue Mountains, we don't get the real version because we have not earned the priviledge to that knowledge. We learned so much about their history. They have plants which will procure an abortion, cure cancer and act as contraceptoin. Will they pass this knowledge on? Nope. You have to earn the right. This is a contentious issue in Australia at the moment with pharmaceuticals literally throwing millions of dollars at them asking for the secrets. The most they get in return is a plant that will get rid of stings. The crazy thing is, there are still Aboriginis living the traditional life in the park but you never see them or evidence of them. They must be very different to the drunk bums that can be found in every city in Australia.

We spent two nights camping in the Kakadu (it is surpisingly chilly at night considering day time temperatures of 30+) and had a quick swim in a waterfall in the Litchfield national park just to say that we've been there, before returning to Darwin. We were very tired, very dirty and consequently not much looking forward to the next leg of the tour, which began at an ever stupider 5.30 the next day. This part of the tour was basically just like a bus trip from Darwin to Alice. 1600km over three days with a few stops chucked in just to break the monotony, including some strange round rocks that scatter the ground called the Devils Marbles and the weird pub Daly Waters which is the oldest and the most remote pub in Australia. With a permanent population of 23 we doubled that on arrival. Luckily, the group (including teams J and S again) and the guide for this bit were all awesome fun. There were silly games on the bus (usually involving dangerous driving and/or inappropriate sexual advances from the guide), there were canoes in Katherine Gorge (with more inappropriate sexual advances), digeridoo lessons and plenty of goon to wash it all down. It was the best bit of all the tours and made us realise that the guide really does make or break your tours. In this case it was defintely a make the tour and he scored full marks from us (in spite of the sexual advances)! It was however just a means to the end...the red centre.

Unfortunately leg 3 started badly. After a drunken goodbye to our last group we managed to sleep through 10 alarms and woke up at 7. The tour left at 6.15am. Ooops. Fortunately our guide was a plank and a wet one at that and just sat downstairs in the bus til we arrived. Luckily for this leg the tour did not depend upon the guide or the group and during our three day safari around the Red Centre we saw some awesome sights, most frequently concerning earth-shudderingly stupendous and irresistibly captivating red rock formations. Veritably the most spectacular being watching the sun rise at Uluru (Ayers Rock), the worlds biggest monolith and Australia's favorite postcard picture. This 3.6km long rock towers out of the sandy scrub nearly 1km tall and as you approach it in the afternoon light it looks like a giant, light brown turd in the middle of the desert. If you had not just travelled for 4 days through the dry and desolate outback to get there, I can see why you may be totally unimpressed. However, at first light Uluru appears as a deep burgundy silhouette against the dark sky, as the sun begins to light the sky the rock changes from burnishing crimson to lush honey and all the rest inbetween with shadows and pits slowly accenting as if from nowhere. We were lucky enough to see the full moon dropping towards the surface of the rock as the sun came up. Breathtaking! It was bloody freezing though and most of the tour group stayed on the bus. idiots! They missed the best bit of the whole nine days (for me anyway). We also took in the Olga's which was for Lara more impressive than the rock and had a hearty hike around Kings Canyon. All very gorgeous and all very cold. By now it had been 9 days and nights of campfire fun and frolics and it was freezing cold. We slept in swags under the stars which can only be described as body bags. Made from canvas you lie them out and zip yourself it. It was extremely extremely cold. In fact it barely scraped 0 degrees by 11 in the morning. Fortunatley only one member of our group actually caught fire in the night. She was Ok. Only a few burns really. It could easily have been Lara though. I know she has bad circulation but do any of your Orr's sit/sleep further than 1 foot from any burning fires????

Righto, that's about it. No tour would be complete however without camfire stories and boy we heard some frightners and now have some of our own to add. Having lived in dorms for 8 months now solidly it is easy to see why every guide starts the meet and greet process with a good ole campfire chat of weird dorm stories. Staying in a dorm is weird and I am very excited about the days coming when I can wake up without 16 other sets of eyes looking at me, various people snoring, farting etc and just to have the privacy to put my PJ's on without having to be under the sheet or hidden in the loo. And the luxury of my own dooner cover. No beg bugs, smelly sheets, unexplainable stains or drunken sickness everywhere. Anyway, I digress. Recently Lara had the wonderous opportunity of sleeping in a mixed dorm with a young scots lad in the bunk next to her. He was a little bit weird at first. This turned into a lot weird when he tried to get into her bed 3 times in one night. The first time she thought it was a mistake. The next time she woke up to find him lifting up the bottom of the dooner. Obvioulsly there was much shouting and expletives which I seemed to sleep through. The last straw came when he claimed a THIRD time to be looking for his credit card. Lara's response went along the lines of "It is not in my bed FREAK!!!!!!!!!!!". But this has been eclipsed by this true account we found on another travel blog. We are all for homosexuality but when it starts to border on pervy it is not right. Read on if you want to know why dorm sharing is an unfortunate necessity. The dorm by chance is the one we had the roaches in in Darwin.

We quote.....

"I've moved into a cheaper 16-bed dorm which is a bit of a shit-hole, but it's an all male dorm, which unsurprisingly I dont complain about. It even inspired some poetry:

It's hard being gay,
In a dorm full of boys.
A child's mind,
In a room stacked with toys.
Boxers shorts, bottoms and burly delight,
Masculine smells, a woman might fright.

I feel like a spy,
As I chat, smile, no lie.
But I can't stop the glance,
Of my wandering eye.

Ok, it's no Yeats, but it passes the time.


I dont think I'll ever forget this one sight .....

He wandered in,
As I unpacked my bag.
Wearing only his trunks,
And his mighty swag.
My blood didn't know,
To go up or go down.
But settled itself,
In an unwanted frown.
Why couldn't I say:
"Hello, How's your day?"
Instead of reacting,
So terribly gay.
But now we don't speak,
The moment did pass.
Thought I still steal a peek,
At his fabulous ass."


WHAT A FREAK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! You will now have realised that we are not quite so up to date with the blog again...ooops but at least we started with the best intentions. We are well on our way to finishing Oz now with just the ickle matter of the East coast on our home straight to tackle. I am so very glad though that we made the effort to come out to the centre because it will definitely stick in my memory as one of the best things we have done. Yep, ANOTHER highlight.

---

Photos

Flying back to Sydney
Did I mention how barren this place is?