Kakadu

Kakadu National Park! One of only 11 places in the world listed as a World Heritage Site for both it's cultural and natural aspects.

The trip started off a little shaky when we nearly missed our bus in the morning due to faulty alarms and then showed up in the town of Jabiru and realized there was... nothing. No people, no town (it was really only a little block of stores) and it was so bloody HOT. We checked into our "hostel" which turned out to be a Bush Bungalow- a hut with slatted floors and corrugated tin walls full of holes and covered in screen. The roof was tent material and the bathroom was in a seperate building. We came to really like it, but at first it seemed a bit, well, rustic. We really were in the middle of nowhere.

Being the intelligent young women that we are, we booked ourselves onto two full day tours that picked us up and dropped us off at our little hut, and they turned out to be excellent!

Saturday we went on an Aboriginal cultural and arts tour to Arnhem Land which is within the park but fully under the control of it's original owners. Our guide was an extended member of the tribal leader's family and so could take us to a lot of sites that were not open to most visitors. We saw a number of billabongs full of wildlife (didn't see the crocodiles that inhabit them though) but lots of native birds including the 3 species of egret and the Jabiru or stork. We saw a bunch of rock paintings, some tens of thousands of years old, a sacred burial site complete with human bones, and a working art center and gallery.

We were taught some survival skills in case we were to get lost in the bush (like how to kill a file snake- bite it's head off, how to hunt for long neck turtles, getting water from paperbark trees, and what the Southern Cross is- do we have different constelations in the Northern hemisphere?) We also found out that the Arnhem Escarpment used to be the coast of Gondwana- the mega land mass before the continents broke apart. Crazy!


On Sunday we went on another 4wheel drive trip, but this time to Jim Jim Falls (named after the An Jim Jim plant, or Pandanus tree). It was a long bumpy ride down a 2 track road and then we hiked 900m down a "path" that was really just a scramble over huge limestone boulders. When we made it to the base of the falls we got to go swimming in the pool at the bottom, and actually got to swim right under the falls and get splashed by water coming down 250m! The water in the pool was about 60m deep according to our guide, and I tried not to think about the Rainbow Serpant rumored to be in it as I swam over it. There was another beautiful beach in the valley/gorge and Hannah and I went wading in it after lunch. The little fish were very curious and I had my toe nibbled so we high tailed it out of there. On the hike out we saw a file snake (but didn't bite it's head off) and learned about the Eucalyptus called the Darwin Woollybutt (hehehe).