To Kakadu

Thursday 26^th June 2008

Paul left at 7:30 to pick up the Landcruiser and wasn’t best pleased when he found it still dirty inside and out (surely that is an important part of the service – even if we are only going to get it dirty again very soon?!) and needing new brake pads which they only thought to tell us about after they’d put everything back together. Even more annoying was the fact that they couldn’t work on them for another week by which time Paul needed to be on his way to Alice. Great service, not. And I made sure I told them that when they rang me a week later to check how we’d felt about it.

Naturally the girls’ first thoughts were of the bouncy pillow which wasn’t so bad since it left me free to do the packing up. Sadly, I hadn’t had my shower or finished the job before Paul got back so the shower had to wait and I had to get a move on.

We set off to Kakadu in bad spirits and that wasn’t helped by it being further than we’d thought. A lot of the documentation we’d read had talked about it being more or less the same distance from Darwin as Litchfield so as the kilometres started racking up the map was more closely consulted. Ahhh... those guides had been talking about the distance to the border of the Kakadu National Park, not Jabiru or any of the other places in the park. And we were heading beyond Jabiru...

We had a stop at the Bowali Visitor Centre where we got all the info we needed – excellent sheets with good detail, friendly staff, clean facilities and a really well laid out and informative presentation area (which the girls still managed to rush through in under five minutes!).

We found our way to the campsite at Merl which is near Ubirr and the Arnhem Land border. We had to go around the loop a couple of times to find a suitable spot because it is just a first come, first served kind of place with small clearings set up for one or two campers. We did have to share – outrageous – but the natives were friendly. There was a (hot) shower block which by this time we were very much in need of and managed to get in while there was still plenty of hot (solar-heated) water which apparently petered out shortly afterwards.

As evening approached we headed off to Ubirr to look at the rock art and listen to a ranger giving a number of talks. By this stage the girls had turned feral (I’m not sure why – I don’t remember feeding them anything too dodgy) and we dumped them on a bench with their books while we checked out one lot of art. By the time we returned (only 10 minutes or so later) we were able to sweet talk them into joining us for the next presentation. The ranger was excellent with some good stories and props and she engaged all the kids there very well.

Looking at the rock art was amazing – most of the stuff at this overhang was of food – all the different kinds of fish they ate/eat along with a couple of different turtles. There was also a picture that is in the style known as contact art – of a whitefella who had a hat on his head, a pipe in his mouth and his hands on his hips. This was because they were always telling the blackfellas what to do! The other amazing picture at this site is of a thylacine – they became extinct about 1500 years ago so this art has to be at least that old and it sits on a large piece of rock that spends most of the day facing into the hot sun. Apparently the red ochre paint they used actually soaked into the rock which is how so many of the pictures still exist today.

For her final trick the ranger led us up on top of a huge rocky outcrop to tell us more tales as the sun set over the wetlands looking towards Arnhem Land. It is a stunning location – wow. And the sunset was pretty unbeatable, too, with some haze adding to the atmosphere.

The camping ranger was taking no chances of campers getting away without paying and had set up a road block leading into the campsite – a little bit of overkill, I thought, but I guess it works for her – she knew where we’d all be at that time of night if we weren’t already back at camp.

After dinner our neighbours had lit a fire so we got out our marshmallows and toasted a few while chatting to them about travelling – they’d done a stint a couple of years before where they’d been away for two years!