The Northern Frontier

Darwin and Kakadu

With only a few weeks left in the semester, the tentative exam schedule was posted; mine shaped up to be 3 tests starting 5 days after the end of classes and running, evenly spaced, for the next 15 days; as near as I can figure, they found the optimal schedule to eliminate any possible chance for further travel. Fortunately, a week later, they discovered their error in asking me to put classes before my senseless gallivanting and moved things around for a 12-day window; naturally, I was obliged to plan an utterly crazy trip to the distant tracts of the Australian outback.

One of my fellow American slackers volunteered to go with me so I half-jokingly proposed a 4000km drive from Darwin to Adelaide; in a strange and terrifying twist, she not only agreed to this, but suggested that we tack on another 1000K and fly out of Melbourne.

So we set about buying flights; Ashley had a 2-hour exam at 6PM but had no qualms about booking a 9:10 flight at an airport 20km away with an airline that forbids you from checking in less than 30 minutes before takeoff. I immediately set about finding a way to avoid getting mixed up in this, and found a solution in a slightly roundabout flight plan that would go from Gold Coast Airport (100km south of Brisbane) to Sydney (900km further south) and then immediately 4000km northwest to Darwin – at a hundred bucks, this came out to be about half the price of the direct approach, but I would've done it just for the sheer inanity of it.

The 2-hour train ride and hour flight south went without a hitch but when I reached Sydney, I was told that I didn't actually have a connecting flight and thus had 20 minutes to run down to the baggage claim, run back to check-in, get through security and get back to the gate I had just left to board the same plane I had just deplaned; I suppose it's good to get your blood pumping a bit before 5 hours in the air.

The ride to Darwin was long – and as is the standard for Virgin Blue flights, there was no food, drink, or movie, and the audio channels were heavily laden with ads. At one point I foolishly tried asking for tap water, but the best they could offer was a cup of ice; I held this between my legs for 2 hours and was able to ward off dehydration with a few precious melted drops. I was seated next to a British guy who was apparently new to the whole non-smoking flight thing and gave me a countdown every 5 minutes of the time til he'd get his next cigarette; had we been in an emergency exit row, he would've been out on the wing.

Getting off the plane, I quickly realized that Darwin's was perhaps among the world's worst airports for sleeping; the arrivals lounge was one room and had crowds passing through all night, and beyond that, visitor information notified me that on this particular night, a construction crew would be taking a jackhammer to the tile floors for four hours. So when Ashley arrived (she made it to the Brisbane gate with 5 minutes to spare) we brainstormed for places to pass out. There was a nice soft spot of woodchips just outside the terminal, but it was surrounded by what turned out to be “death poles" and was a little close to the loudspeakers. We looked at a map and, trying to defuse our bleak prospects with humour, said “Hey, there's a golf course a mile up that way, we can sleep there." When she instantly agreed to this, I wanted to say “are you nuts? That's the worst idea ever!" but I didn't want to lose face by shooting down my own suggestion, so only managed “Ok… I guess we're sleeping on a golf course."

As we walked, we discussed the logistics of the plan and decided that a bunker or putting green would probably be ideal, but we would need to space ourselves far enough from the water traps to avoid the man-eating crocs that frequented the area. Along the way, we ran across a school playground and decided to set up camp in the slides – hoping that we wouldn't be awoken by the preschoolers that would no doubt be frolicking there come morning.

I never actually slept but did manage a few quality hours of exam prep before we started moving at around six. The car place didn't open til 8 so we opted just to trek across town to the distant suburb of Berrimah. Here we got our Holden Commodore – truly a beast of a car, it seated 5 and slept 2 and has the fuel efficiency of the Saturn 5. We were equipped with full camping gear (sans tent) – including a folding chair and tables, a cooler, mosquito head nets, a German guidebook, and a large metal mallet (in case we got a hankering for roo burgers). The rental agreement forms were all in German, so it's not entirely clear what we signed off on, but soon enough we were behind the wheel and taking the left side of the road towards town.

We frenetically ran around to all the backpackers and called everyone listed as wanting a ride in our general direction (and even in the completely opposite direction) and tried to sell our grand adventure. We soon found two Israeli girls with a schedule identical to our own and enough luggage to eliminate any notion of squeezing in a fifth person. We breezed through the many wonders of Darwin, from the waterfront esplanade where you can feed giant fish, to the NT territory museum with the 5m croc “sweetheart", and set out for Kakadu National Park.

The first few hundred kilometres were a bit dull – sparse, dead trees lined the road, and controlled bush fires filled the skies with smoke. Everywhere giant birds of prey swooped down just inches from our non-insured windshield. We reached Ubirr towards the end of the day and took in a small collection of aboriginal rock art before hiking up to the top of elaborately stacked rocks to get an incredible view of the surrounding formations, lush green lowlands, and sunset over the distant mountains – this was likely the best view I'd come across in Australia thus far.

We tailed a 4WD (roo blocker) back to the bustling town of Jabiru – the sole piece of civilization in the park, here they have a gas station, two caravan parks, and a snack machine – and we attempted to find a place to sleep. I went in and spoke with the manager of a campground who said he'd give us a campsite for $25 – I told him I'd take this back and confer with my team, but in the 5 minute interval before I returned, he had barricaded the door and turned off all the lights. So we decided to just use their showers (sure, it looked a tad suspicious for 4 people in towels to walk in from the parking lot) and try to find primitive (free) camping.

We stopped at a site next to some wetlands with a name I can't even begin to pronounce or spell. The camp was packed, but the humans were outnumbered a thousand-to-one by the mossies (in the dead of winter, too – I suppose with a nightly low of 28C, Kakadu hadn't had its first freeze just yet).

We saturated our skin in bug spray and hulled ourselves up in the car but it was to no avail – every inch of the interior was soon abuzz in the blood-thirsty bugs. We quickly conceded defeat in this, our first encounter with the outback, and made a mad dash back towards town. We parked at the main shopping center and resolved that rather than risk letting more bugs in, we would simply keep the car closed, kill everything already there, and sleep in our seats. What followed was all-out war – the carcasses of a hundred bugs littered our clothes and bloody streaks ran across the upholstery; we spent an hour fighting with fists and flyswatter – we would squash one and three more would spring up in its place - we suspected that our blood levels would soon be exhausted. In the end, there were simply too many of them, so without a word, I took my sleeping bag, grabbed a grassy spot outside, and passed out in the open air – when I awoke, I found others sprawled out a short distance away – we were all soaked thoroughly by the dew but made it til morning without too many additional bites. We would never forget the battle we fought that night – occasionally I'll awake screaming, images of that gory fight flashing through my mind – when we later saw people applying bug spray for a hike, we couldn't help but laugh – what do they know about mosquitos?

At dawn, we retraced the road we had set out on the previous night and soon stopped for a hike through Anabangbang (ting-tang-walla-walla) Billabong; as luck would have it, we were just in time for a biweekly guided tour where we learned about the myriad plants that could be eaten, used as soap or slept in (as well as an identical set of plants that would kill you instantly on contact). We climbed to the top of a big rock and explored a series of caves and overhangs filled with aboriginal art, which vividly (and by vividly I mean in the same way as a 4-year-old's art project) portrayed kangaroos, turtles, and evil spirits that beat women with yams and ate them. From there, it was a steep, exhausting climb to a lookout tower which provided views of absolutely nothing as it was surrounded by dense foliage. We took a boardwalk along yellow river (which was obviously blue) and visited a cultural centre where we learned that nearly everything in the bush – from death adders to flying foxes – could be a tasty snack (if you happened to live in the middle of the desert with no Safeway nearby).

We took a 40km dirt track into the interior of the park and found a small trickle down the escarpment, which would surely be a mighty torrent in the wet season (when all the park's roads are impassable and there's no way to see it). There was a cool, relatively croc-free pool at the top of the cliff face which gave me the chance to wash the clothes I'd been wearing for the last 3 days. The girls were complaining about the return hike, but strangely, no one jumped at my suggestion of taking the world's biggest waterslide back to the waterfall base.

With no desire to spend another night in the park, we opted to ignore the “don't drive at night" mantra and made for Katherine going 120. Without careening into a single cow or 3m high kangaroo, we made it into the town of 10,000; there was apparently a lively night scene that rocked the pubs til 4am, but we pushed on to Nitmitluk Park where we spent a comfortable night under a clear, bug-free sky. A horde of menacing wallaroos was moving in on our precious supplies, so we left Ashley outside to sleep with one arm on the cooler.

We were packed by 7 the next morning and ready to see the grand Katherine Gorge, but when we went to start the car, it only emitted an odd clicking noise; there's nothing like a car problem in the middle of the wilderness, but fortunately this particular wilderness had a payphone and lots of people, so we managed to diagnose our dead battery and get a jump so we could roll over to the neighbouring parking lot.

We made a quick circuit to the edge of the gorge and back – there were apparently 15 gorges and days worth of hiking to be done, but I think we got a decent rundown on what the place was about in our hour long jaunt.

On a tight schedule, we hurried south until the turnoff for the Aboriginal town of Barunga which was hosting a cultural festival. We showed up several hours too early for any actual festivities such as spear throwing and “bush-tucker" tastings; there was only the standard chip and fairy-floss fleet and a bunch of vendors hawking knock-off tennis shoes and t-shirts bearing the names of American rap artists. There was also a man made entirely of fruit and vegetables wandering around; the local children were giving him the appropriate beat-down, but he kept that cheery cantaloupe smile through it all.

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