The Northern Part of the Northern Territory

This was my first experience driving internationally, and on the left hand side of the road, too!!! It turned out to be a piece of cake for me. But of course, after I got out of the town of Darwin and onto highway, I saw another car every twenty kilometers, maybe. So, the challenge wasn't great. I wasn't thrown by passing cars, driving around traffic circles or turning into traffic. However, I understood that there are only 200,000 people total in the entirety of the Northern Territory with 100,000 being in Darwin, so we were not talking density here. I read  that the Northern Territory is considered the real Australia by most Australians although few live here. Monsoon rains drench this tropical north known as the Top End.

To me, the wilderness of Kakadu (another World Heritage site) did not seem as remote as in Africa because you drive for the most part on tree-lined, two lane, paved highways with road signs. But once you leave the highway, it really is really remote.  The trip from Darwin to Aurora Kakadu is 220 kilometers, but once out of the city, the speed limit is 130 km/hour, or around 80 miles/hr. That is pretty fast by American standards. So, I started my road trip with a feeling of being one-half of Thelma and Louise without the convertable or the gun, with rock music blasting on my radio. Even arriving at Aurora Kakadu in the late afternoon continued the feeling of the movie with the sports fishermen characters that were hanging out at the bar. Luckily, no excitement ensued. Aurora Kakadu ended up being the best place to stay for me because it was 40 kilometers in from the edge of the park and hence was at the start of things to see. Kakadu is BIG (8,000 square miles) with 300 species of birds, 75 species of reptiles, 50 species of mammals, 8 species of marsupials (of course), 50 species of fish, 25 species of frogs, and 10,000 species of insects. Supposedly, there are more monsoons and lightning stikes in Kakadu than any other place on the planet with rocks more than 2.5 billion years old, and it has been home to Aborigines for over 50,000 years. I checked into the hotel and told the woman at the registration desk that I was going to check in with her, or someone at the desk, each afternoon after I returned from that day's adventure, so that "someone" knew where I was since I was travelling on my own. When I had not called the front desk by 6pm the next night, she called me from home on her day off to make sure that I was ok. I had just walked in the door to my room, and that meant so much to me!!! She said that she lived alone and also travelled by herself so knew what that felt like, so wanted to make sure that I had a good day. Yet another angel watching over me!!!

The following day was a free day so I drove 44 kilometers into Jabiru, the only "town" in the park. It is not a four star destination. It is small and poor and scattered and lightly populated (1,800 people). However, two of the main accommodations are located there, as is the airstrip from which you take scenic flights over Kakadu, which I planned on doing the next day. So, I checked out the other hotels and did a dry run drive to the airstrip and then drove another 54 kilometers to Nourlangie Rock to hike the trails and see the aboriginal rock art. There are two sites in Kakadu where you can see rock art (it has over 5,000 rock galleries accessible only to Aborigines), but I could not gain access to the second location, at Ubirr Rock, because of flooding. So going to Nourlangie was an awesome thing to do. The art here, which is of the Arnhemland tribes, is of the internal x-ray style, meaning that the pictures are drawn showing the insides of people, animals, plants, etc, with the original purpose being information for hunting purposes. The rock art at Ayer's Rock was external, not internal, and the art in Cairns and Alice Springs is dot art. Each tribe has its own style within a greater regional style, and from what I can tell, each region's art can be distiguished from one another by the specific style and the clansmen/women artists who do the painting. It is a very complex subject and I have just begun to recognize regional distinctions after reading books in galleries and centers. I then drove up and down red dirt side roads to see where they led but decided against taking remote hikes since the areas had snakes and crocodiles and only the woman who checked me in at the hotel knew that I was in Kakadu.

The following day, I drove 47 kilometers to be at the airstrip by 7:30am to take the one hour flight over Kakadu. We were very lucky because it had rained during the previous evening but the morning was clear. We flew over rainforests, rivers, wetlands, waterfalls, escarpments, valleys, monsoon forests, lakes, and an active uranium mine just outside of Jabiru. It was hazy again, like my flight from Alice Springs, so many of my pictures did not turn out, but the views and the extent of the vast park were awesome to behold. From the flight, I drove another 50+ kilometers into the park to go to the area called Coolinda, the location of another accommodation, so that I could board a boat to take a tour of the Yellow Waters Billabong. This one and a half hour cruise was HOT and STICKY but worth the effort. We floated over submerged grasslands and saw trees half under water. We saw lots of plants and animals, the most significant of which were an "old salty", a 4+ meter long (13 foot) saltwater crocodile sunning himself on a bank, a pair of breeding White-Breasted Sea Eagles perched just above us in a tree across the waterway from their nest, a water monitor lizard, several kinds of kingfishers, magpie geese, Jabirus or Black-Tailed Storks, and so on. Very exciting. People with bird life lists would have been going crazy here.

That leads me to my final listing about Kakadu. Each day, weird as it was, I had an "animal of the day". The first day, when I drove to Nourlangie Rock, I saw land goanas, or Australian monitor lizards, twice, each one trying to cross the highway. One was about 2 feet long and the other about 1.5 feet, walking off the ground with their thick legs, like Komodo Dragons, their cousins, but not poisonous. Then I never saw another one. The second day, when I was driving to the airport and Coolinda, I saw Dingos, or Australian wild dogs, three times, one black and the other two a dull wheat color. They were very skinny and were running along or across the highway looking for road kill along with the hawks and ravens. Then I never saw another one. On the third day, I saw Dittley Squat. No, that is not a rare marsupial, but it might as well be. After all, there is a town named Humpty Doo and a common black and white bird named Willie Wagtail. So you can decide if Dittley Squat is a possibility somewhere out here. However, everyday, I saw AND HEARD ravens, white cockatoos with yellow on their wings, and Wallabies eating grass outside my hotel room. I even had geckoes mating on my bathroom window and a tree frog in my room. As you can tell, the animal entertainment was better than the local tv.

As I left Kakadu, I was trying to think of why visiting this place felt so different than my previous travels. I realized that my experiences in each place that I have visited so far were filled with rich and rewarding interactions with people and this visit was devoid of people. After thanking the woman at the reception desk and telling her how much her connection had meant to me, I was blessed with a two hour talk with the manager of the Digeridoo Hut, an Aborginal Art Center a half hour's drive out of Darwin. She works with all of the local, nomadic Aboriginal artists and told me of their culture, the politics of the region, the role she plays in working with them, and what life is like there on the edge of Arnhemland, the area of the Northern Territory only accessible to Aborigines. There is actually a "border" and you need a permit to cross over, because it is their land and holds their sacred sites. I Then felt complete, thanks to Karen. As I was leaving, I learned that the Northern Territory is one of the least populated places on the planet which explained why I was going through people withdrawal, coming from Yoygakarta, Java, one of the the most populated places on the planet.

Sights=incredibly gorgeous Aboriginal art work, creeks swollen to road level, flying gaggles of magpie geese, cocktoos in trees, ditches and on the wing, goana monitor lizards, men fishing over bridges and at the dges of creeks, road signs saying "Floodway" or "Extreme Danger-Saltwater Crocodiles Live in this Waterway", long streches of highway lined with rust colored grass and trees, a long-necked turtle walking down the middle of the highway, rain clouds in the distance, pink, blue, and white water lilies in ditches and creeks, a saltwater crocodile, thousands of dragonflies flying over marches, leopard-spotted canna lilies, vehicles of all sizes pulling motor boats of all sizes, aboriginal art work on rocks at the end of a long escarpment, billabongs with trees half deep in water, total wilderness, monsoon forests, impassable roads due to flooded creeks, birds and trees in many shapes and colors,

Sounds=geckoes chirping, ravens and cockatoos squawking, airplane engines, boat engines, Aboriginal languages being spoken

Tastes=nothing to speak of here. Did not get to try Barramundi

Smells= hotel room refrigerator smelling of fish, fragrant flowers