Darwin :: Australia
On being a "bus tourist"
Places: Sydney, Darwin, Litchfield, Kakadu & Katherine.
Coolest thing I did: Saw real live Crocodiles in the wild
Coolest thing I didn´t know: .
When you’re and Australian living in a foreign country people tell you all about their trips to Ayer’s Rock and the Top End with an expectant look on their faces like you know first hand what they’re talking about. You nod sagely at their discussions of butter thick air and scaly, dangerous wildlife but really, you’ve got no idea what they’re talking about. The reason, of course, is most Australians seem to go and see half the world before going and visiting their own back yard. I’m pretty firmly in that camp, but due to my brother taking a job in Darwin over the last 6 months I have had the prefect excuse to see some bits of Australia’s Top End that have up until now only been known to me via National Geographic.
Darwin itself is a tiny place that’s trying very hard to get a whole lot bigger. Almost half the buildings here seem to be in various states of incompletion, cranes perching on the exposed ribs of half build multi-storey buildings. They tell me it’s a combination of increased military presence and the resources boom (you can see refrigerated tankers carrying Liquefied Natural Gas pulling out across the harbour) that’s causing Darwin to stretch at the seams. The lucky thing for Darwin, as opposed to a place like, say Dublin that’s been going through similar pressures of growth is between the Japanese Imperial Forces and Mother Nature Darwin has pretty much a clean slate to build on. As late as 1974 90% of Darwin was destroyed by Cyclone Tracey, giving you lots of room to put in nice wide roads and big high density buildings.
Still, it seems that even a 5 min wait at the lights or any whiff of not being able to get a seat at a restaurant causes Territorians to claim the place is getting way too crowded and going to the dogs.
People don’t come here to see Darwin, they come here to see the big name national parks. I’m up here at the very end of the wet season and most rivers no longer have defined banks, but have spread out onto the flood plains. I decided that even though I’m nowhere as fanatical an angler as my brother and Dad I got up at 3am to go fishing with them on the lower reaches of the Mary River. Despite my reservations about launching boats into Crocodile infested waters IN THE DARK(!) it was an experience to see a blood red sunrise coming up over endless water punctuated by the very tops of trees. Our attempts to catch the sport fish de jour, Barramundi, didn’t amount to much but we did have a fun day tearing around in the boat and catching fish too small to legally be kept.
I especially liked the real world encounters with Salt Water Crocodiles. You’d spot them slinking off the river bank into the water (down the river more, where there actually were defined banks) or a pair of reptilian eyes floating just above the surface. We got probably our best look at one when my brother cast a lure that got caught on a tree not too far from our boat which caused a crocodile that had been lurking under the water to race towards it. There was some debate at whether it was worth trying to get a $15 fishing lure away from the crocodile but with a bit of casting lines in the water to lure the croc away we did manage to get it back. Amazing animals to see up close.
We did also get to see some wallabies, some dingoes and even a snake on the way in, which you don’t really get to see on the tours because the animals tend to avoid the heat of the day when most of them go.
The next two days were a blur of going on bus tours with my Mum to Kakadu and Katherine. I remember why I don’t like bus tours now, there’s just too much logistics into getting everyone on and off the bus to look at every little thing, have a wee or eat something. While we covered a massive amount of ground in two days it was highly frustrating. Still, at one point I did have to laugh at the self-superiority of a younger group who came on a tour of the same places in a cover truck rather than a bus. Their guide would say “just wait for the bus people to move on…”. Seriously, I don’t care how young or old you are or how rugged you vehicle looks, if you pay someone to do all your thinking for you when you travel, you’re in the same boat. Man, that superiority gets on my nerves.
Right, back to the sights.
I liked the two boat cruises the best, one over the Yellow Waters of the South Alligator River (so named because the bloke who found it wasn’t much of a zoologist) and the one through the salmon pink cliffs of the Katherine Gorge. The wet season is the wrong time for seeing the big animals like Crocs and Buffalo by the water but it does attract a whole lot of bird life and things like turtles. Both tours were taken by part-Aboriginal guides, and both were very funny blokes. My favourite one liner was when the guy taking us down the Yellow Waters was late getting us back and said his boss always told him to apologise to groups if he was late. “Sorry. There, that didn’t take 220 years to do, did it?”. Classic.
I also like the cave paintings at the Nourlangie Rock, and even more I liked the fact that while the guide would happily give you his interpretation of what he thought they meant, he admitted that no one really knew and anyone who claimed otherwise was full of crap. I found that very refreshing.
I think was surprised me most about the landscape is that it wasn’t as desolate as I’d been led to believe by David Attenbourgh. While the trees are spread far apart there is grass about a meter tall covering everywhere, making it all look quite lush. I’m told that the way they know the wet season is over is that grass is knocked down by strong winds but still, it was a nice sight to see some life out there.
Documentary watchers will know that there’s been a bit of a debate about whether the Aboriginals were hunter gathers in the strict sense or whether their abundant use of fire to alter the landscape on a massive scale could be considered a kind of agriculture. They used to burn large swaths of grassland in a fairly ordered pattern to try and encourage new plant life and the migration of animals in search of new food.
Actually, you get told lots of these kind of legends where, with hindsight, it turns out the natives were right. One that sticks in my mind was that the people of Kakadu have referred to the area around the Ranger and Jabaluika uranium mines as being cursed lands, which could have been explained by the presence of radioactivity. Or that the area around Nourlangie is rich in ore, probably explaining the large lightning strikes in the area the Aboriginals had identified. While all these are impressive I'm wondering about all the tales they told that haven't been substantiated or have turned out to be plain wrong. Maybe we're being dazzled by a very small section of stories that were right but they suffer from survivorship bias and most of them are either wrong or unlikely. Still, I wonder how much knowledge that took centuries to build we're still losing because we don't at least try and collect all these stories. Who knows, maybe BHP could be looking for exploration rights in all the Aboriginal cursed lands. Stranger things have happened.
I think you don't quite appreciate how different things would be if you came back in the dry season except if, like my parents, you'd been here in both. They told me I'd be very impressed by the magnetic termite mounds, so called because they are big, flat, tombstone looking things that align with magentic north. I would have been, only the grass was so long I could only see the very tops. I did see some of the other, rougher looking Cathederal type termite mounds, but I never really did see the magnetic ones. Maybe I'll come back and see it all in the dry one day.
In fact, I'd say this few days has done nothing but whet my appetite to do more travel in my own country. I've been so focused on seeing the world I think I got a bit blind to how far people come to see Australia and how very unlikely they are to be disappointed. Maybe when I grow up and come home I'll try and see a whole lot more of it.