Northern Territory Travel Guide

It sounds funny, but go to Darwin in the "suicide season" (summer) as hotels are cheap, tourist attractions are uncluttered, the seedier characters stay off the streets, and Kakadu looks awesome at that time of year!

The itinerary for my last day with the AAT Kings tour group changed totally at breakfast this morning when the news surfaced that the entrance to Litchfield National Park was flooded and that we could no longer visit the park or go swimming at Wangi Falls as planned. Mike had been given a report by his boss early this morning that the road into the park was under nearly two metres of water, and had been getting half hourly updates throughout the night - but the latest news was that the water level, although dropping, was still at over a metre and that the road was likely to remain impassable for some time. On board the coach, Mike and Lisa explained that they had discussed the situation, considered all the options and decided that we should go instead to somewhere called the Territory Wildlife Park in Berry Springs, forty Kilometres outside Darwin. This resulted in a number of people with a collective mental age of about five mumbling under their breath and storming off the coach in a huff, claiming that their entire holiday had been ruined and that they wouldn't be going to no boring wildlife park, but the rest of us accepted that there's not much anybody can do about the weather and we headed off towards Berry Springs for our unexpected excursion. Driving out to the Wildlife Park didn't take long, and AAT Kings paid our entrance fee as the storms had stopped us from being able to visit a Crocodile farm yesterday which we had already paid for. We were met by a girl at the entrance, who was altogether too chirpy for that time of the morning, and she explained every tiny detail about how the park worked before handing us all maps and booklets repeating everything she had just said in case we hadn't been listening. Which most of us hadn't, being still asleep. The park is divided into sections representing the three major habitats of Northern Australia - Monsoon Rainforest, Woodlands and Wetlands. Each of these areas is either a self contained environment supported by the creeks, rivers and forests of Berry Springs, or is contained within a geodome or indoors where environmental conditions can be simulated year round. It's all quite impressive, and the management obviously think they're a smaller version of Disneyland as they've even laid on a "train" that trundles around the roads picking people up from out the front of each environment and dropping them off at the next. My main complaint about the day, if any, is that we had to be back at the coach at the ridiculously early time of 12.15, which didn't give us anywhere near enough time to see everything. Why do coach tours do this? We've already paid to get in and the coach isn't using any petrol while it sits in the car park, so why don't they just leave us in the park all day where there are plenty of restaurants and cafes to keep us happy until evening? It's a mystery to me. My favourite area of the park was the aviary - I could've spent the whole day there. This is something unlike anything you've seen before - instead of having birds crammed cruelly into tiny cages with hardly enough room to perch, this place was nothing short of an opportunity to observe the birds going about their daily business. A wooden walkway started at ground level and raised me slowly upward, higher and higher into the rainforest, right up to the canopy where it zigzagged in and out of the trees with birds zooming past my head and landing on my arm if I decided to stick it out. Multiple habitats have been created for various avian species, and every now and then the walkway would lead me into a sort of hide in the sky, where I was able to sit and watch the birds through giant windows looking right out into the forest and often right into their nests in adjoining trees. Eventually, the walkway led me into a huge space-age biodome which was totally cut off from the rest of the forest and through which the treetop walk continued with jaw droppingly beautiful tropical birds flying everywhere. Even when I finally left the biodome, the walk continued through monsoonal rainforest for some twenty minutes before it gently began to slope back down to ground level and finally emerged back onto the road. I really wanted to be five again, so I could get away with screaming "Go again, go again!" For those wishing to experience birds which are more likely to eat you than sit on your shoulder, the park also offers two Birds of Prey shows daily. A couple of handlers stand in the middle of a large grassy area surrounded by a wary looking audience while various Kites, Hawks and Eagles zoom over the crowd with an average headroom of about three centimetres to grab food out of the hands of anybody who happens to have been foolish enough to bring any. The handlers, who are also clearly accomplished comedians and have the crowd in the palm of their hands as all Australian showmen seem to do, make it quite clear that no attempt has been made to train or tame the birds - they simply know where the food is. Nevertheless, Birds of Prey really don't need to do much to look impressive - just the sight of an Eagle soaring majestically out of the distant trees when called, narrowly missing the heads of small children who shall remain emotionally scarred by the experience for the rest of their lives, and grabbing a small piece of meat out of the handler's outstretched fingers before vanishing over the horizon again is enough to impress anybody. Afterwards, various Hawks and Eagles could be found sitting on logs around the outside of the green snacking on great lumps of meat and looking up occasionally as though to say "Yeah? You looking at me?". We were advised, just in case any of us were suffering from terminal stupidity, not to stroke them. Myself, I wasn't even going to look at them funny. In the aquarium, there is an underwater viewing tunnel which runs underneath a billabong (1) in one of the habitats and I was able to get the closest I have ever been to a really mean looking Saltwater Crocodile - albeit on the other side of a sheet of glass. The sign said that Salties can reach speeds of up to forty kilometres an hour on land, so I'm sure he could've taken a run up and smashed through the window if he'd really wanted to eat me anyway - or at least, that's what I'll be telling people when they ask about my brave encounter with a croc. Today has been really relaxing, and I'm really glad we didn't go to Litchfield as planned as this has turned out to be a great day out. The best thing about the Territory Wildlife Park, as far as I'm concerned, is that there are no animals in cages - the Kangaroos and Wallabies seem to just be wandering around in a massive conservation area, quite happy. They seem to be quite ahead of the pack in Australia when it comes to the things that actually count for anything - the environment, animal welfare, Aboriginal rights. In fact, Australia is one of the most forward thinking countries I've visited on my travels, and it really shows. This evening was the last that the AAT Kings group would be spending together - I'm off Westward and the others are all going their separate ways or flying across to Cairns to join another tour heading south. For a farewell meal, we all trotted off to find a nearby restaurant and ended up in an American chain called Sizzlers, which was certainly an experience. For some reason we were expected to line up upon arrival, as though this was a roadside truck stop, and only after having ordered and paid at the till were we approached by a waitress who provided us with cutlery and showed us to our table. The main problem with this arrangement, of course, was that several of us decided that we wanted a desert after we'd finished our main course - this required lining up all over again and confused the hell out of the waitress who was waiting at the end of the line and couldn't quite get her head around the fact that we already had cutlery and a table! Half way through our meal, we were interrupted by a commotion at the next table. It appears that a young mother had taken it upon herself to change her baby on the dining table - yes, you did read that correctly - and this had upset the management somewhat. Australian hospitality might be a wonderful thing, but it does have its limits.

(1) Billabong is an Australian term for a small lake or pond, often empty in the dry season.

You can read my complete travel journals at www.offexploring.com/globalwanderer and www.offexploring.com/globalwanderer2

Unfortunately, there is always one person in every holiday group who seems determined to annoy as many people as possible, and at breakfast today she decided to join me at my table. This lady - we'll call her Betty - must be in her late 50s and seems to think that she's done pretty well for herself over the years and should share all her knowledge with everyone, whether they want to know or not. So over my cereal this morning I found myself being subjected to a lecture on the art of filling in tax returns, and she would've got much further in her attempt to tell me how she'd gone to England as a young woman and made her fortune if I hadn't suddenly remembered something important I had to be doing elsewhere. According to the literature at the hotel, Katharine Gorge boasts facilities for hiking, boating, canoeing and scenic flights along the Katherine River. As our time in the area was limited, AAT Kings had arranged a boat cruise for us which would allow us to see the gorge and also get to do some limited hiking within Nitmiluk National Park, home to the indigenous Jawoyn Aborigines (1) to whom it is a major cultural site. At the moment, the Katherine River is pretty tranquil and the cruise was relaxing, but it isn't always that way - much of the "top end" of Australia is prone to flooding from Cyclones and rising river levels, and in the wet season it really is pretty much touch and go whether any of the attractions and parks will be able to open from one day to the next. The last major flood in Katherine was in 1998 when the Katherine River rose twenty-three meters and flooded the town and surrounding areas, causing mass evacuations and the region to be designated as a national disaster zone (2). The cruise turned out to be about thirty of us crammed into what didn't amount to much more than a large raft with seats, but we didn't mind because Katherine Gorge can't be described as anything less than incredible. In fact I honestly don't think I could come up with a word to describe the intensity of the scenery as you sail along the river between towering rock walls seventy metres high, the silence only broken by the clicking of camera shutters and the screeches of birds. It's difficult in Europe to go anywhere where there is no sound of traffic to distract you - but here in Katherine Gorge, you really can forget that such things exist. Surrounded by rock faces, banks of grass and with birds wheeling overhead, it doesn't seem such a stretch to imagine that you've travelled millions of years back in time and that up ahead there'll be a brontosaurus wading across the river. Although the gorge is around twelve kilometres long, there are areas of the river which are full of rapids and dangerous to pass unless you're in a canoe. The boatman tethered us to the shore just before we disappeared over the edge of a mini waterfall and those of us who felt up to it got out for a leisurely scramble across loose sandstone and through narrow gaps in the rock walls. Striding off ahead as though expecting us all to be Olympic athletes, our guide obviously took his job very seriously and seemed very excited to have us following him around - occasionally he would seem to vanish altogether, and just when some of us were starting to wonder how to get back without him his head would pop out of a hole in the rock face and he'd call out excitedly "Come on, come on, this way. Nearly there" as though somehow whatever we were going to see would run away if we didn't get a move on. Eventually, we reached a point at the base of the gorge, obviously inaccessible by boat, where the rock face was literally covered in Aboriginal paintings - clearly, this area has been a significant place to the Jawoyn for a long time, because it seems that these works of art run the entire length of the gorge and tell numerous stories of Aboriginal history in the area. I had not been expecting to see so many paintings in one place, and to be able to make them out so clearly - in some places, the rocks are so well protected from the elements that the paintings look almost untouched since they were originally created. Back on the boat, we headed back downstream for a bit before being ushered off again for another walk, this time with a stern warning that this one was a bit more strenuous and that some of the older members of the group may wish to remain on the boat. The rest of us happily scrambled through tree-lined walkways, dangled precariously over the rapids on narrow rope-bridges and generally cut ourselves to shreds until we finally emerged into a clearing in which a quite spectacular waterfall cascaded into a crystal clear lake. Miss know-it-all from breakfast this morning was so surprised that she tripped over a rock and we got to watch her expensive new camera arc through the air in slow motion and land with a satisfying plop in the middle of the pool, which would've mean much more pleasing if we hadn't been distracted by the guide plonking a big blue box down on the floor and cracking it open to reveal drinks and sandwiches. Mind you, she did manage to lock herself in the toilet on the way back to the dock on the boat, so we all had a good laugh then instead. Those of us who had come prepared stripped down to our trunks and dived in. Oh, it was bliss - I couldn't wait to see the faces on the people back at the boat when we told them that we'd been swimming under a waterfall and sitting by the pool eating sandwiches while they sat and waited for us to return. My only regret about today has been that we have to stay in a hotel tonight. Nitmiluk provides perfectly good camping facilities, and I would've been quite happy to sleep under the stars surrounded by Aboriginal paintings and the sound of the river. Maybe next time.

You can read my complete travel journals at www.offexploring.com/globalwanderer and www.offexploring.com/globalwanderer2

(1) In the Jawoyn language, Nitmiluk means "the place of Cicada Dreaming" (2) In April 2006, the Katharine River once again rose to around twenty meters and flooded the town with very little warning. Homes were once again filled with water and millions of dollars worth of damage was done. A state of emergency was declared in the area, but this time little damage was done to the houses themselves and the town quickly got back to normal. Needless to say, Home Insurance is at a premium in this part of the world.