Into Kakadu

Another hotel breakfast and then hit the road heading east out of Darwin by 9am. First stop was the Leaping Croc Cruise on the Adelaide River, which we drove all the way to and discovered it was booked out! Thankfully there are two other jumping crocodile businesses in the area, so we picked one and spent an engaging 20 minutes in the Window on the Wetlands visitor centre while we waited.

The croc cruise was fantastic, the crocodiles are enormous predators (up to 6m long in some cases!), and the wranglers on board bait them with hunks of meat in the water. Just as the croc goes to snatch the meat, they lift it away like Lucy in Peanuts, while the croc lifts almost its entire body out of the water with an enormous splash. On the way back to the dock they also threw some meat scraps to the local Kite bird population who swoop in and catch the meat in their talons.

By now it was lunchtime so we backtracked slightly for a nice picnic ground at Fogg Dam. It's in the middle of a wetlands area and calling it a "dam" is a disservice - it's really more of a levee or embankment with a road on it. Shandos remembered a nice walk along the dam looking at the wetlands, but since the wet season hadn't fully receded yet the walk was still closed (mainly due to the threat of crocodiles).

So we had a picnic lunch overlooking the fens and then headed east towards Kakadu. We headed most of the way across the park (still probably 80km wide at this point), to a place called Ubirr (You-beer) where there's some beautiful rock art. Some of it is thousands of years old, some of it is much newer than that, but apparently it's quite acceptable to paint over someone else's artwork! It still blows my mind sometimes that Aboriginal culture in this area is mostly unchanged from 50,000 years ago.

We spent quite a while looking at the various artworks and learning about aspects of the culture. By now it was closing on sunset and thankfully Ubirr is renowned for them. After a rough but not-too-difficult climb we reached the top of a rocky outcrop with several hundred of our closest friends. The sunset over the wetlands was magnificent, and the sandstone escarpments of Arnhem Land glowing in the distance.

But we needed to beat a hasty retreat since the area closes at sunset and night falls extremely quickly after sunset. Thankfully we were staying just nearby at Merl Campground. A little basic but given the size and features of our motorhome it didn't really matter! The only gripe was no powered sites meant that we couldn't run the air conditioning overnight!

Sausages and salad for dinner, and crashed into bed by 9pm after a long day of driving. Thankfully not so much of that tomorrow.Read more