I flew into Darwin from Singapore to start my Australia experience. I checked into a hostel recommended to me by the guy who drove the shuttle bus from the airport; Melaleuca On Mitchell. Since I arrived at about 4am I wasn't too bothered where I slept for the first night, I could always move in the morning. Also it had a bar and a swimming pool, so it sounded fine!
I got into my room and the first thing I noticed was that it was freezing cold! The aircon was on full blast and the fan was blowing the cold air around and bloody noisy! And the guy in the bunk below me snored rather loudly as well!
When I woke up, around 10/10:30am I took a walk around the hostel, then around the street I was staying on, Mitchell Street.
I didn't want to spend long in Darwin, but get out to the National Parks and see some of the Aussie outback.
I spoke to a couple of tour operators and finally decided on a 3 day, 2 night Unleashed tour to Kakadu National Park, the main one in the Northern Territory of Australia. There were only 4 people booked onto the trip, so it had just gone on special deal; Aus$395 instead of $445. I was assured that would bring the number up closer to the maximum of 16. I wanted to go with a larger group to start meeting potential travel buddies for my tour of Australias West Coast.
The tour left in a couple of days so I had a bit of time to kill, which gave me time to chill in the pool and meet the other travellers.
It turned out to be a strange crowd. It seemed really cliquey and the people didn't feel as approachable as I was used to in SE Asia. There were a few groups that I tried talking to, but they seemed to have spent quite a bit of time together and not make a huge effort to bring new people in. I think it was because a lot of them were working in Darwin or trying to find jobs, so even though they were backpackers, they were a little more settled.
I ended up having a few beers with an Aussie guy, a German girl and another guy I can't remember. We played some cards and made small talk, which was a bit boring, but it killed the night.
The next morning I got up and chilled round the pool, reading my book on the history of the French Foreign Legion and making small talk with the other residents.
I met a Canadian guy who was cool and also felt the same about the place.
I was going to head to the night market for some food with a couple of the guys I met during the day, but by the time we all got sorted it was too late. The market closed in 15 minutes and it was a 20 minute walk!
We ended up getting a takeaway (Roast Dinner in a roll.. Yummy) and having a couple of beers. I had an early rise for camping trip so was more than happy.
Kakadu National Park
I met my tour group at 6am for an early start into the Aussie Bush. As expected, no more people had booked onto the trip! So it was just me and the 4 other people there. There was a Danish couple, and American kid, Japanese kid and an Australian Sheila who was friends with the tour guide. They seemed like a really nice bunch, so I was sure we would have a ball. The 4x4 (a big thing) turned up and out jumped one of the biggest balls of energy I have seen! Especially at 6am with a hangover and no coffee. Our tour guide was an Aussie girl called Leah, who at first was rather full on... very energetic, but I was happy as this would mean she would keep the pace and energy up throughout the tour, which I am sure will tire us all out, so having someone like that leading us was probably a good thing.
We loaded up and moved out and I fell straight to sleep and didn’t talk to anyone for a good couple of hours! When we arrived at the first service station we had all started to wake up a bit and started to get to know each other.
Just before we entered Kakadu National Park we pulled off the highway to a small road that leads into the bush and to a large marshland. We got our first sights of some wildlife there and a glimpse of how bloody hot the next few days were going to be! It was, maybe, 9am and already well into the 30’s. We carried on driving to our first stop and saw a wallaby running along side the road, which was cool. My first Kangaroo (ok, I know a Wallaby isn’t a kangaroo, but close enough!).
Our first stop was a boat ride on a river. As we loaded up the boat driver started to tell us quite a bit about the local area, animal and bird life. In the wet season, which was due to start in a few weeks the water level rises quite a lot.... Around 8 meters, so all the land we could see would be underwater. All along the trip we kept seeing bit of dried grass high up in the trees above out heads, which marked how high the water goes. Obviously most of the park closes down during the wet season.
As the boat moved along the river our guide told us about a bunch of the trees, the birds we could see, pointed out the crocs and gave a really good intro to the Outback. The crocks were pretty awesome looking. There are two types of Crocodile in Australia, Freshwater and Saltwater crocs. Saltwater is a bit of a misleading term, there are no “saltwater” crocs, these ones can just live in fresh or saltwater, and the freshies can only live in fresh water. The salt water crocs are also larger than the freshies and can be a little more aggressive. The freshwater crocs don’t eat anything larger than your hand, so they will only really attack humans if they get scared. The Saltwater crocs will happily grab you off the banks of the river, drag you into the water, have a bit of a thrashing roll around with you, then eat you! I think they are the ones to look out for!!
After a couple of hours on the boat we got back to our 4x4, the “Green Machine” as it was known by the tour guides, and lunch was ready. After a bit of tucker we got back on the bus and carried on driving to our next site. When we got there we went for a hike around our first location (the names of these will escape me for now, but I will update this blog in a couple of weeks when the guide emails me with a list of what we did) I enjoyed this hike as we got a lot of information on the Indigenous people of Australia, the Aborigines, and learnt a lot about their way of life before and after white man came to the island.
There was a big thing about the way tribes operate and how children grow and learn. It was also pointed out that what we were being told was for the people around the Northern Territory, and it would be different for tribes all around Australia. There are a lot of similarities, but also quite a few differences.
I won’t go into too much detail about what we were told, as there was so much, but key bits that interested me were the fact they have no concept of age. They don’t count years but work on a childs development, the amount of respect they get from others and how responsible they are. When they reach a certain level, more information is passed on to them in the form of stories. So as a man or woman gets old, more and more information is passed to them and they have more seniority. If they are not ready for that information, they don’t get it. The same is for the white man, the stories we get are normally not complete. It is a summary of the story and meaning, but the rest is not for us to know.
They are generous enough to give us that much information to help us understand their ways. One Aborigine in particular was a little concerned about this as information was getting lost. As white man interfered more and tribal people were moving out into the cities, people were not getting to the levels to receive all the information, so it was dying out with the older generation. This man decided to break tradition and started to write down a lot of the information. This isn’t made generally available, but has spawned the tourist trade we were saying. Everything we were being told was because this man let us have it. I haven’t mentioned his name here, which is another important sign of respect.
In their culture you do not talk of the dead. It is considered back to look at pictures of or say/read then name of dead people. This is normally for a mourning period which may be a couple of years. This was very evident around the parks. Where there were signs with quotes and information, very often the name of the person who said it was covered up.
Other information that I found fascinating was their concept of kinship (family). Over thousands of years they have developed a very intricate measure of each others relationship to everyone else in the tribe. This came about as they must have discovered the problems with inbreeding, to the point where a brother and sister are NOT allowed to be in close proximity to each other or talk. If the brother enters a room, the sister has to leave. They have developed a system where you can work out whether you are one of two names (I forget them at the moment) and then you work out your relationship to your mother, daughters, and other people in the tribe. This then tells you who you can marry.
It is really involved and I haven’t even scratched the surface on how it works, quite simply, because I have no bloody idea! It’s quite involved and complex, but simply, it is phenomenal that they developed this level of understand so long ago, certainly before our western scientist knew about genetic diversity and inbreeding.
We saw a lot of cave drawings in this park as well. Cave drawings serve multiple purposes. Sometimes they are to tell a story and other times they are for luck. It is considered very bad to touch up someone else’s drawing, but you can paint over it with your own. If they were going fishing, then they would paint a picture of the fish they want and that would bring them luck in their fishing. Because there are so many layers of these drawings, it is almost impossible to date them. There are certain things that can be used to give a general date, such as animal life that only arrived in the last 2000 years means that those pictures must be newer than that, etc. Some of the cave drawings have been dated back (through fossil records) to 20 or even 50 thousand years.
We carried on our hike up a bit of a hill and arrived at a beautiful lookout point which gave us great views of the landscape. There will be some photos up here soon.
After walking and learning about the land and the animals and the aborigines we headed back to the green machine for the final drive to our campsite. We were a little behind schedule so it was dark when we arrived. Our camping gear was brought out, swags. We were going to be sleeping Australian style. A Swag is a mattress (a thin one) with a mosquito net over the top that you tie to a couple of trees and sleep out right under the stars. We were not sure if it was going to rain or not, so we set up some tents just in case!!
Whilst camp was being set up, I was charged with making the fire for cooking and light. Not a problem, we had collected some firewood on the way into the site and I made a pretty damned fine fire, if I do say so myself. All those reckless years as a youth playing with matches and Cub Scout training finally paid off. Man makes fire...
Dinner was great and we sat around the camp fire with a couple of beers and carried on chatting about the outback, the aborigines and a whole bunch of other topics that invariably come up around a campfire after a couple of beers!
Since it was so dark, we had the most amazing star field I have ever seen. Once again I was sitting there looking up at the Milky Way... that faint, cloud like haze running right across the sky. And a whole load of shooting stars.
Sleeping in the swag was a fantastic experience. I tried to imagine what it would have been like to be back a few thousand years ago and have no understanding of the physics of the world. Looking at the stars, wondering what they hell they were and what was out there, listening and feeling the wind through the trees. That was a big one for me. Lying there in the quiet and dark you get a sudden, gentle rush of wind. But you hear it coming up on you through the trees.. there is a definite start of it as it comes up and then a definite end as you hear it move away. It really did feel like some sort of spirit or invisible being floating through the sky keeping watch over us. I wondered if that was where the concept of spirits and god, etc came from. It did feel like it could have been a living thing moving around, and with no understanding of the world I can see how people would have come up with an explanation like that. So after my hippy moments watching the stars and imagining I was a caveman with wind spirits flying around my head keeping watch of me, I fell asleep.
Next morning we rose with sunrise, got some brekkie in us, cleared up the camp site and jumped back in the van. We headed off for our first hike. We walked for a couple of hours into a great big waterfall area. This was stunning, and huge. It felt like a massive rock tube with a plunge pool at the bottom. Since we are still in the dry season there is no water coming over the fall. In the wet season the sheer volume of water that flows over is massive, hence all the flooding I spoke about before. Time for a spot of swimming.
Beautiful fresh water, maybe 29 degrees, fairly clear water. Nice. After the heat, it was really nice and refreshing. On the way in we had seen signs warning of possible crocs in the area, and we did even see some freshies in the river on the walk in. It seemed pretty clear when we got there!
We stuck around for a while, then dried off and hiked back out again. We drove on to another area (I think these ones might have been Jim Jim falls) had a bit of a hike and then another swim. These pools were beautiful. You can go to the top side or the bottom and we decided to hike a bit more to the top. There were a few pools for us to move around, a little rock swim lane for us to explore and all that jazz. It was nice, refreshing and chilled. As we were walking back to the green machine dusk was descending and Leah was getting a bit nervous trying to speed everyone up. Apparently this is when the snakes come
When we were done we headed back to the green machine and on to our next camp site. It was dusk when we arrived, so set up again in the dark. Our group was fantastic.
When were were setting up or clearing down the camp site or cooking everyone chipped in and did there bit, which was really great.
That night was more of the same, a couple of cans of beer and a bit of chat around the camp fire then off to the swags for some more hippie spirit watching and then off to sleep.
In the morning it turned out everyone had a pretty rubbish night. It was a bit warmer and for some reason everyone in the group kept waking up, or not being able to get off to sleep. I had a fantastic nights sleep! Everyone hated me!!
The final day we moved to one last spot for a hike and a swim. Then we had a long journey back up to Darwin for the end of the trip. As part of the cost there was a free meal in one of the bars in town. I headed back to the room for a well earned shower (the first in 2 days) and then back out for my free dinner. Everyone apart from out Japanese friend made it out and I ended up partying with Leah, the guide for the rest of the evening. It was a fun night and a great end to the outback tour.
Darwin
After the tour I had a couple more days in Darwin before my flight to Cairns. I just spent this time chilling out around the pool sunbathing. I went back into a different room and met up with a couple of English guys and a couple of Dutch guys. We hung out for a couple of days and went to the cinema one evening.