Kakadu

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Kakadu
After my splendid day cycling around Darwin, a slightly dodgy Italian meal that had me stuffed to the gills and bloated like a Yorkshire slapper, and a frosty night at Elkes under the radioactive power blasts of the AC unit, it was time to be awoken before the crack of dawn by the Wilderness adventures tour team for the three day, two night camping excursion into Kakadu National park, one of the most famous and desirable parks in all of Australia, by reputation. It is held in almost mystical reverence by Ozzies and even by my brother. I was off to go see why and to check it all out for myself.
I get picked up by the tour guide, Ruth, at 6:00am, and we are driven up fashionable Mitchell street to the head office where we have to fill out irrelevant and ridiculous paperwork then pay $35 that could easily have been included in the first payment. Upon arrival at the office, there are teeming hordes of tourists milling around, looking stressed, while one beleaguered office woman is collecting the irrelevant shite from one tourist at a time, much to the chagrin of the teeming horde. I switch into wolf mode, secrete myself to the front of the pack, deal with the stuff while lightly chit chat chattering away, get out of there and hunt down my coffee hit, knowing that this whole process, so ludicrous and stupid is going to take ages. I suddenly realize that the Ozzies are so much more similar to the British than Americans: this completely farcical, disorganized shamble is so typically railway-station English: all it needs is tea and scones, Bruce Forsyth, and the BBC in the background to finalize the deal.
Eventually, we get back on the bus where some dude has snatched my seat so I end up on the back seat. The last guy on board sits next to me and we immediately start chatting. His rather odd accent resolves itself into a guy from Berlin who has spent a year in New Zealand, and is now coming to the end of a year away getting ready to face a compulsory stint in the German army. This is twenty-year old Klemens. He is destined to be one of my closer friends on the tour. Sitting next to Klemens are a French-speaking Swiss couple on their second honeymoon after a year of marriage. He’s a high school teacher of Geography and Math. She’s a student (oh, you cheeky monkeys!) about to graduate with a degree in Sociology and is intending on working with disabled people. She is very skinny. He has a little goatee beard thing. They’re very nice and appreciate my burbling, horrific attempts at French, but inevitably are assimilated into the French-speaking group. The rest of the French-speakers are Clair and Isolde, who are both cute, confident, but not able to integrate with the English speakers despite a couple of sheepish attempts around the camp fire on the first night, aided by roasting marshmallows and beers. There were two more members of our little team destined to be one little clan throughout the tour: Yann is an almost doctor from Austria who lives in Munich. He’s friendly, slightly gay seeming, but actually not, and eventually reveals a rather unpleasant cruel streak, but is nevertheless part of our little group. While collecting firewood for the second night’s campfire, he slaps a twenty-five foot tall tree and with a look of shocked surprise etched amusingly on his face watches as the entire tree falls over - He is thereafter known as ‘Tree-fella’. Klemens earns the moniker, ‘The Hammer’ because of his predilection for using his booted feet to smash all manner of firewood into fire-sized pieces. On the second night, he repeatedly raises and crushes the half trees into chunks using a sixty pound rock, goaded on by my World Wrestling Federation style commentary. Mauricio is the ‘Music man’, a fascinating and friendly ladies man from Mexico who enthusiastically donates the voluminous entrails of his Ipod to the speaker system of the 4-Wheel drive vehicle. I end up being the DJ and I drive them all crazy with my attempts to keep it interesting by having hair-raising changes of genre every other song!. After a while due to the mysterious ailment that causes the front seat duo to abandon the tour and be whisked home, supposedly for medical, but actually for prissy reasons, Klemens and I migrate to the front seats where I spend the entire tour having great fun talking ludicrous Monty-Pythonesque bullshit with the charming and funny tomboy driver-guide, twenty-eight year old Ruth. We invent tales of man-eating Wallabies with machine guns, giant rampaging Kangaroos dressed in red thongs (Footwear, silly, not dental floss underwear! Kangaroos would never wear that style of underwear. They favor bikini-briefs), and other similar ephemera, as well as putting the World to rights in a three-day long, very entertaining social event.
It’s a long and already steamy ride to the entrance to the park. We stop to get water and beers and the like, and we stop for photo-ops here and there. The landscape is a shrubby, arid, red-earth environment that is pretty consistent for much of the trip. We see a few delightful and cute wallabies: these are smaller and cuter than the golf-course kangas of Cairns.
Our first stop is a billabong cruise. Billabongs are seasonally fluctuating ponds teeming with wildlife, especially wetland birds - and Crocs. Ted, our genial captain drives us around this gorgeous scene for an hour or so punctuating the delightful ride with laconic commentary, photo-ops and opinion based environmental tit-bits, especially about the sexual relationships of the birds: he points out the ‘dead duck walking’, a single duck separated from his life-long monogamous partner and therefore destined to die in the next few days -they just can’t live without their partners. How dreadfully feeble, I thought. He points out two other examples of lifelong monogamous flying beasties, then one promiscuous little flutterer that couldn’t give a flying feather about who he’s pecking. Ted leaves the metaphorical significance hanging in the air as we slide the boat alongside a whopping and wicked-looking four-meter croc basking beside the scurrying duck-lets. Apparently, the late breeding family of fourteen is now down to four: it’s a harsh place, this beautiful billabong World.
The next stop a few hours later was our first walk of the day. The essence of this giant National Park is a large escarpment that rips through the center of the park stretching from the North East and curling through to the South-West for a few hundred kilometers. It reaches up to about three-hundred steep and rocky meters. Most of the sights of the park are to be found at the base and tops of this escarpment.
It’s a deliciously evocative sight as we approach it. The landscape itself keeps reminding me of other places. As we get to the escarpment and start our work, it’s reminding me of Dogon Country in Mali. At other times, and especially around the billabong, it reminds me of Brazil and the Pantanal. It’s an ancient landscape, of course, like those distant places, and, like them, it has a sort of melancholic throb that percolates through the thick sultry air and permeates everything. We walk up the side of the cliff face to see aboriginal artwork: red earthy colors, and basic stick figure illustrations of spirit stories, surrounded in red and yellow tones that mirror the rocks around us. The rocky overhangs create a sort-of ancient aboriginal town, with rocky cave homes, ceilings decorated with mythical stories. The floors are decorated with glazed-looking rock chairs worn smooth and glassy by twenty-thousand years of ass crack grease and ass polishing.
If you strip away the rather gross, (but extremely accurate) account of the ass-grease polished rock chairs, you’re left with a continuously inhabited area, like a hilltop exclusive community, overlooking the South Alligator plains, a beautiful and evocative scene from up here, from where people have, no doubt, sat and gazed, ten thousand years before the first farmers started planting wheat in Mesopotamia, ten thousand years before the first slaves were dragging the rocks to make the Egyptian pyramids. The place just oozes a timeless, ancient, historical quality. The place is called Ubiri.
We all snap away, gallop to the top, listen to Aboriginal myth stories about female mischievous spirits called ‘Mimis’ getting accidently trapped in crocodiles while cruelly teasing each other, and we see the cutest marsupial in the world: an eight-inch tall rock wallaby. We get steamy hot in the deeply humid air, gaze down into the tropical, primeval floodplain and dream of ancient reptiles roaring while prehistoric birds soar, swoop, and screech.
After Ubiri, we drive away to our first campsite. We stop, and the whole gang stops to collect firewood. Angus and the two sisters, who are the only little group to spend the whole three days mostly not helping, sitting back sneering, and generally being bad sports and ugly c**ts, do nothing while everyone else drags all the wood we can find back to the camp. At the campsite, one group gets the fire going, another gets the food preparation going, another starts setting up tents and swags (a sort of cross between a sleeping bag and a tent). I am destined to peer out of one of these swags for the next two nights: the first night up into the scudding clouds until they’re torn away deep in the night to reveal a shattering sky bursting with stars and the howling wind kept whipping the trees around, in a mad slightly alarming frenzy: the second night, too hot, zipping and unzipping in the sultry air while mozzies threatened, until the early hours when crisp air returned - just in time to be woken up for the final day’s early start. Lovely around the roaring camp fire, drinking XXXX beer, (or ‘liquid shit’ as one thoughtful Alice Springs barman called it) eventually unfurling the swag, clambering in, watching the dancing flames.
Of course, we have to wash up and clean up, and the whole team works well and enjoys the experience - all except Angus and his subterranean group of nitwits who sit around being sarcastic, divisive, and ugly. They remind me of something to do with home, but I cast such ugliness from my mind and get back to flirty nonsense, pathetic French attempts, and creative hypothesizing about why the German team got scared against Spain.
The next day was a hearty breakfast after the wind disturbed but evocative night, then packing up and heading off for our major hiking day. We had camped at the base of the escarpment about a hundred kilometers south of Ubiri at the base of two sets of waterfalls; Twin falls, opening today for the first time in the season, and Jim Jim Falls.
The first walk up the escarpment was lovely: steep and beautiful. At the top we reached the river and followed it back up until we found a fabulous swimming spot and took a refreshing and delightful swim, some excellent arty photos, and a snack. I drifted off the back of the group to wallow in the atmosphere for most of the walk. This was a good idea except for one short spell where I got lost in the scratchy scrub for a few minutes. After a couple of hours, we descended, bumped into a different group for the first time in the day, then headed off to a different part of the escarpment, where we took a little cruise, followed by a short walk to the very impressive Jim Jim falls. Here I got into the water first, then swam what was a lot further than I thought in the surprisingly cold water to the waterfall itself and stood under the three-hundred foot cascade. Brilliant! This was the highlight of the day for those of us who made the swim: Durban (the South African), Klemence, Mauricio, Yann, and me.
After this swim, we decided to go back to the same camp - we had helped dig out a stuck vehicle and one of Ruth’s colleagues had broken down, so we ended up having to choose whether to re-camp in the day light, but have to leave very early the next day or set up camp in the dark closer to the next day’s activities. We chose the former. By now our little group was a well oiled and humming machine. We set up camp got the fire going and were eating kangaroo steaks, buffalo sausages, and drinking beer before you could sing the opening verse to ‘Waltzing Matilda’. The Kangaroo did not taste like chicken; the buffalo sausages were rather too rich and gamey for most of us. Tonight there was less of an attempt to stay up: the group was already cemented, and we were all tired. No roasting marshmallows. Klemence got back to his slightly arson tainted fire-starter behavior; I had a nice shower before retiring to the sultry swag described earlier. Excellent day indeed.
The final day started at 5:30m: we rolled up the swags and headed off into the darkness, pretty much in silence for the first hour. Eventually, Ruth and I got back to generalized silliness as the miles unfolded. When we got to the so-called Culture center for our one hour immersion into Aboriginal technology: basket weaving, spear chucking, and making horrid fart sounds on a didgeridoo, Ruth pissed me off by skipping the promised coffee. I went off and scrounged a cup from a camp site, so that improved my mood - though I didn’t forget how quickly Ruth had gone from my best friend to, ‘we can just drive back to Darwin for a coffee if you want and forget about the activities’. I was surprised how quickly she turned into the sort of guide who really should go and get a different job: I mean, who did all the cooking, cleaning, and packing? Other than driving and joking around with me, telling me her life story and such, she had nothing to do. Why so snarky, b****h!
Anyhow, with a warm cup of crappy coffee, equally lukewarm Aboriginal cultural activities, the day could only get better - and hotter - which it did. We went to another delightful waterfall, took another delightful swim. By this time our little group was a pretty tidy little family unit, chatting, joking, and absorbing the gorgeous trees in silence when the time called for it. Also like a family, we were all bitching about Angus and his miserable clan of lazy succubus. With internecine gossip now in place alongside the glorious sights and sounds, the tinkling of gossip alongside the quips and chuckling friendly laughter, the final day came to a close with a long drive back to Darwin, with the strains of badly named Ozzie bands to round out the journey. Perfect.
Back in Darwin, Mauricio, Klemence, Yann, and myself went out for drinks and a meal. Ruth couldn’t - she was off on another job tomorrow. We ate, rubber-necked, drank, ended up in what looked like either a local gangster saloon, or a gay bar, before scampering away into our separate destinies: For Klemence, more days in Darwin, then home and the army, for Jann; Cairns then China, then Austria, For Mauricio, Melbourne then an unknown future, and for me: an early wake-up call then a giant train ride from the North of Australia to the South, stopping off in the middle for a three-day tour to mystical, fabled Uluru, the big, red, rock!
I could hardly wait.
Sleep clamped down on me like a vice….
See you on the flypaper

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Comments

[anonymous]

WOW!!!! What an adventure for you. Your descriptions are amazing and I could imagine it all and being a hidden croc there too. Enjoy the big red rock. Lucille

[mike allen]

Lucille
Cheers Lucille. Thanks for reading along with this stuff. How's your summer evolving?