Darwin 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

The coach journey from Darwin to Broome has been an experience, to say the least. There seems to have been an almost total lack of communication between the driver (I'm sorry, I mean the Captain) and Greyhound themselves - elsewhere in the world he would've been able to keep in constant touch with the company over a radio in the cab, but I guess the wide expanses of nothing making up Australia makes radio reception impossible. Instead, we have had to rely on information given to the driver en-route by locals as to the state of the roads ahead. Every time we stopped at a roadhouse, he would encourage us to take our time having a spot of lunch or a "smoke-o" while he shot off to speak to somebody in the know or possibly make a phone call. We would all be left standing around with our fingers crossed, hoping that the next leg of the journey didn't turn out to be underwater. If at any point the weather had turned bad again, there's a pretty good chance the driver would've simply turned the coach around and headed back to Darwin - assuming, of course, that we hadn't all staged a sit-down strike in front of the wheels which I think was on the cards on at least two occasions. We had, of course, all had to sign the usual waiver forms back in Darwin saying that we accepted the risk of being stranded by floods, but in reality I think there were some people on board who had seen the worst of the weather over the last few weeks and probably would've nailed the driver to the door of the roadhouse by his testicles if there had been even the slightest hint of having to turn back. And who exactly would've been able to stop them? I hope Greyhound pays danger money! I've been wondering about this for a while actually. How exactly do you maintain any semblance of law and order in a country the size of Australia where each town is hundreds of kilometres from the next and only contains two hundred people and a couple of police officers? Any serious crime of any kind and surely the local police must be totally overwhelmed - and by the time reinforcements have taken all night to arrive from the next town it's all over and the criminals have fled the country! Riots have been known to flare up in Australian towns over things as trivial as somebody letting their dog walk across a neighbour's garden - in 2005, back in Boulia, a major riot ended in a standoff outside the local police station in which a mob threatened to kill two local policemen. What made this case even more bizarre was that one of the women taking part in the riot was a local councillor and that, since no legislation existed at the time to cover such a thing, nobody was able to remove her from office even after she had been convinced. It was left entirely up to the electorate to decide whether or not they wanted a rioter to remain in power after the next election. I'll say it again - only in Australia. We stopped at Katherine on the way to the border, which was certainly an interesting place to experience by the light of day. The transit center in Katherine is a petrol station and a guy with a microphone. I'm not saying Katharine is a small town, but the "Welcome to Katherine" and "Good-bye. Please Come Again" signs are pasted back to back onto the same pole. I hesitate to describe it as a one horse town, but if you did take a horse there then there wouldn't be any room left to swing the cat. I could do this all day. And yet, Katherine does have an internet Cafe from where I was able to send some e-mails home. The Internet, for some reason, took off big in Australia almost from the moment somebody came up with the name. No matter how small the town is, there will always be public access to the Net for next to nothing. In some places where there are no viable shops in which to install a computer, the local school allows access to the Internet to the public in out of school hours. This, I'm guessing, is another indication of just how important backpackers are to the Australian Tourism industry - wherever you are, probably even at the bottom of the Great Barrier Reef, you'll be able to get internet access somehow. You may, in some places, be connected via a 14K modem which takes three weeks to send a single e-mail, but at least you have contact with the outside world. I'm now crossing into Western Australia, which can best be described as a huge expanse of wilderness scattered with National Parks. In fact, although we haven't had time to stop and have a good look, we passed today through Purnululu National Park which is home to the famous Bungle Bungles - which are nothing to do with the Geoffrey-Geoffreys and the Zippy-Zippys. Only really truly appreciated from the air, the Bungle Bungles are a range of mountains formed as hundreds of imposing irregularly shaped red striped mounds sticking hundreds of metres into the air. Every nook and cranny in the rocks is filled with lakes, woodland and abundant wildlife - and the Bungle Bungles are certainly one of the most imposing geological features of Western Australia, attracting energetic hikers probably with no idea what they're letting themselves in for. I have no doubt that clawing my way through the Bungle Bungles and constantly coming across hidden lakes, caves and gorges could make me want to set up camp and never leave, so perhaps it's best that my limited time in Western Australia forces me to pass straight through. On another occasion, I'll almost certainly be coming back and spending some time exploring this region of the country in more depth.

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