Kakadu National Park

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Got to Darwin early enough and checked it out. Vibrant young exciting city, but you can’t go swimming in the sea. We reckoned that we could see big Salties (Estuarine Crocodiles) swimming the harbour below the cliff we were standing upon, so we went and had a Vietnamese instead and chilled out.




Next day was our trip to the Kakadu National Park. It is a huge national park 2 hours from Darwin. It has spectacular natural scenery and wildlife, including millions of birds and reptiles. It also contains some phenomenal indigenous sites that can be visited, in particular the interesting aboriginal rock art paintings. There are a few that you can visit within the park and are easily accessible. We went to see one called Ubirr, guided by a local indigenous tour guide. He explained the different dreaming stories that accompanied many of the art works, and showed us some of the “contact art” that was depicted. Some of the artwork was up to 8,000 years old. Possibly the oldest human made things that will ever see. “Contact Art” is a few hundred years old and depicts scenes relating to the first European settlers that arrived in the 1700’s/1800’s. It was fascinating. That was also the site where some of Crocodile Dundee was filmed, which was pretty interesting. The next day we took a tour off-road of the park. We were brought to see Twin Falls, where we saw a rare endangered turtle called the “Pig-nosed Turtle.” We also visited Jim Jim Falls, which is one of the few spots in Kakadu national park where you can swim. The tour guide told Ciaran that there still might be Crocodiles in the pool as they can never be certain, so as usual…Ciaran bottled it and only got his feet wet because “He thought he saw a Crocodile in the mud, but it was probably just a rock”. That boyo has some imagination ! Anyway Deirdre did a really good job clambering over all the big jaggedy rocks, so everyone had a good day. That evening we got a free talk on the Aboriginal art sites, again absolutely fascinating stuff. Next morning we were up really early and got a sunrise cruise on the Yellow River. The place was teeming with wildlife. We saw the Crocodiles obviously, but also there were hundreds of huge big Eagles, Kingfishers, Jacana (water lily walking birds) and huge big Wetland birds called Jabiru and Brolgas. Absolutely amazing. After the cruise headed to another rock art site, where we had another equally fascinating talk about the archeological findings of the site we were on, and headed back to Darwin. Ciaran picked a motel quite far out of the city by accident, but all was ok, because it was near a Mexican restaurant and also by fluke, near to the airport so everybody was happy. Next stop Queensland…

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