Travelling after COVID 2021

Left Katherine but only traveled 40 odd ks to a place called Edith falls. Here there is a beautiful big swimming hole at the camp and a walking track that takes you above the falls and further up the river to more, smaller swimming holes, but still beautiful and refreshing. Two nights here, which gives us one whole day to explore and enjoy the area, and then we pushed on up the Stuart Highway to Pine Creek, a small mining town at the turn off to Kakadu.
We headed off up the Kakadu highway looking forward to seeing the sites Kakadu national park has to offer. We started to get disillusioned when the first and the most popular, attraction Gunlom Falls was closed due to a disagreement with the local aboriginal community.
So on to the next most popular, Jim Jim falls and Twin falls, but Twin falls was closed, for similar reasons. We have been on some really bad roads, but the road into these two falls was so badly corrugated, and with only Jim Jim Falls open, we turned around after 10 of the 40 odd ks and gave it a miss. Now considering we had to pay a Kakadu National Park entry fee of $40 each and then $15 each per night to camp in any campground, which only gave you a long drop toilet, we were feeling a little ripped off.
We stayed a night in one of these very basic camps called Malabanjbanjdju, see if you can say that? 😄. Thank goodness it was an honesty box system I don’t think I need to elaborate, and then we moved on to Jabiru itself. Jabiru township was built by the Ranger mining company, which mined uranium, to house the miners and their families and give them some basic shops. To get that over the line with the locals they had to agree to pull the town down when the mine closed. So now its 20 years on, and the mine has finished and closed. Well the hew and cry by the locals about closing what is now seen as their town is quite ironic .
The locals have closed some of the best places in Kakadu national park, and now the government has handed the running of the park over to the them plus the township, history will tell us what happens from here.
We went out to Cahills Crossing, on the Arnhem highway which leads out to Arnhem Land, and is famous for Barra fishing and croc attacks. There are some great stories about this place. From here we went out to a site with a lot of aboriginal rock art called Ubirr, apparently renowned as one of the world’s oldest rock art places. Here there is a lookout over a massive plain that fills up over the wet season, now that was something to behold.

After this we took the Arnhem highway, and drove towards Darwin. We stopped at a caravan park called The Bark Hut Inn. Did some washing and had a beautiful burger and cold beer in their alfresco bar which had such great ambiance we just had to do it again the next day.
It was at this park’s campground that my bum nearly had a close encounter with a snake. I was about to sit and eat my dinner when I noticed something that I thought was a scarf draped on my chair. Well it started to move and I realised it was a snake! It was in no hurry to move but it did slowly amble away over the next 20 mins or so. A google search told us it was a Brown Tree Snake. A cream colour with dark orange bands around its body. Mildly venomous but not considered dangerous to humans.

Next was a highlight The Mary river!!En savoir plus