Kathleen
Darwin, Australia & Kakadu National Park – May 11-15
Darwin is also an exotic, isolated place in the North of Australia, with very little but national park for a thousand miles (or sea, to the North, of course). It is a small but lovely town with beaches and a very carribean sort of feel. Much of Darwin seemed very new. We learned that the port at Darwin was attacked by the Japanese just two months after Pearl Harbor, and they lost 1,000 people in that attack.
Darwin had an outside cinema from which you could watch a movie at night whilst looking over the water, which was very neat. We didn’t get the chance to go to a movie, but it seemed like such a great spot and activity.
We spent two nights in Darwin, one before, and one after our trip to Kakadu National Park. Kakadu is a wetlands preserve and this is crocodile country. In a country with a lot of poisonous things, but almost no large preditors, crocodiles seem pretty scary. The areas around the rivers and ponds were signposted to be very wary of crocodiles. We were heading into the dry season, which sees a big movement of the crocs out of this area, but we weren’t quite there yet. Needless to say, we skipped the trails that went around the billabongs (Aussie for watering-hole) and did a couple of viewpoint and rock art hikes instead. This area has many escarpments where they tell us that the aboriginal people have lived for 50,000 years. We saw a bunch of fascinating rock drawings, although it was hard to understand how old they were, since apparently the aboriginal people would paint over and enhance earlier drawings. The highlight of this trip was a boat trip on the river and estuaries where we saw lots of crocodiles (from the safety of the boat) and many, many different bird species. The cruise was at sunset and it was quite magnificent watching the sun go down across this wide expanse of wild land. This really felt like an “outback” experience.