Back in Parkes

I've just discovered that I can discover the keywords that people have typed in to find my blog. This is interesting and a bit worrying. Apparently the most recent keywords include:

- Humpty Doo + traffic lights
- frogs in trousers
- platypus lock ness
- pretty sheep
- tasmania's big thing platypus

Well! This is even more worrying when you realise that my blog entry comes up as the 9th hit when you search for "pretty sheep" on google. My entry doesn't rate higher than "Want a Inflatable Sheep for your party?", but does come above "I might be buying a sheep What do they eat and need ?".

I've had a fun few days. Ms. M. Mao again turned up. This time brandishing a huge leek. Oh gosh, I do hope that nobody finds my blog by searching for "huge leek". She turned my milk blue. Yesterday I went to the pulsar group beach picnic in Manly. That was fun. We played some beach cricket, had some food and went for a snorkel. It was great ... I spotted a huge, bright blue, groper (oh dear, another word that hopefully doesn't come up in too many google searches) - I found a wonderful photo here. I also swam amongst the squid (they're lovely - they keep changing colour), mados and leatherjacket.

Today, Dick, Justin and I drove to Parkes. Now I have to find a way to stay up until 4am.

Day 4: Mum better not read this blog entry ...

I'm back in Sydney. It seems to be just as hot and humid here as it was in Darwin. I had a beautiful last day in Darwin. I walked down to the harbour area and got excited watching a ferry departing for the Tiwi islands. Hopefully, I'll be on it sometime soon.

I sat around on the beach reading "Gould's Book of Fish" that Faith and Mel sent me for Christmas. What a wonderful book! It's impossible to put down and I've now finished it, but wonder whether I should just start again from the beginning.

For the flight back I bought "See Australia and DIE". It's a book full of how people have died in Australia. I bought it trying to learn about the mistakes that people made (so that I don't make them myself). It was scary reading. One guy (in Sydney) was changing a light bulb in his house and then got off the chair and stood straight on a funnel-web spider. Amazingly he survived - by being rushed to Ryde Hospital!

Oh dear, I'm listening to the radio at the moment and someone has just been "taken by a shark". There's plenty of stories in the book about people being eaten by sharks. "Since the shark wouldn't release its grip, they figured they'd have to drag it in. So two of the rescuers grabbed the 2.5-metre shark by the tail and began to haul it towards the shore. One young lifesaver ran into the water and smashed the shark over the head with a surfboard."

Bloody hell ... I've just had the shock of my life. I was reading about all these dangerous creatures and then trod on a lizard that had ambled in and was sitting under my dining table! Its tail is now wriggling around on the floor.

Anyway, after reading the entire book it does seem that there are a few things that you can do to survive in Australia. 1) Don't be "religious" or "spiritual". It seems that if you are then you have a good chance of deciding to walk across the Great Sandy Desert or something equally stupid. 2) Don't pick up animals. One guy picked up a friendly blue-tongue lizard and played with it before realising that it was actually a death adder. Another person decided to let a "blue-ringed octopus" to walk around on his arm. 3) Don't eat a fish unless you know what it is. There's a story of a young couple that caught a fish, ate it and then died. It turned out to be a puffer fish. 4) Get an EPIRB. It seems that almost half of the people in the stories would have survived if they had one. I plan to get one before my next trip. Finally, 5) don't go near crocodiles. It's just as well that I read the book after my trip otherwise I probably wouldn't have left the hotel. There's one story of a group that went camping. "At about 4am, a massive 4.2-metre crocodile emerged from the water and made a beeline for one particular tent. Strangely, it ignored the tent with all the food. Instead, it lumbered up the bank and went straight for one of the furthest tents from the water." The people in this story survived because 1) a 60-year old grandma jumped on the back of the crocodile and 2) they had an EPIRB.

This isn't a cheerful blog post.

Anyway, I'm planning a new trip somewhere. There are so many options!! Ms M. Mao will be visiting tomorrow and then I'm going snorkelling with the pulsar group on Monday. Then I drive to Parkes.

Day 3: Not having Christmas in Humpty Doo

What a Christmas!!

I decided to go for a short drive around Darwin and ended up driving for more than 500km. The scenery was spectacular. I had planned on a day in Humpty Doo (the nearest town to Darwin - according to my map). The web makes Humpty Doo sound particularly exciting. Apparently "The plan [by CSIRO] was to irrigate the subcoastal plain of the Adelaide River and produce a commercial rice crop. The theory looked good. The practice was a total disaster." I arrived in Humpty Doo at about 9:30am and then left again, after seeing all the sights (i.e. the boxing crocodile) about 2 minutes later. This was rather terrible as I'd planned to spend most of the day there. Oh well, I set off toward the Djunkbinj National Park with the plan of doing a few bushwalks and then returning back to Darwin.

The driving was fun. Slowly all the radio stations disappeared (the last going was the BBC World Service) until it was just me, the road and wetlands on either side (with a few huge termite nests every now-and-then for company). I passed a car coming the other way approximately once every 30 minutes.

I crossed huge rivers (all called something like "West Crocodile river", "East alligator river", "Large crocodile creek" etc.) and there were signs everywhere warning me that I'd soon be eaten.

Discovering that you could only get into the Djukbinj National Park with a 4WD, I headed on towards the Mary River National Park. This park was beautiful, but again to get into the park I needed a more manly vehicle. So I kept going ... for another couple of 100 km ... and then reached the Kakadu national park. Wow! Because of the amazing (and accessible) waterfalls, termite nests and hikes, the Litchfield National Park was initially the most spectacular, but the Kakadu park just keeps going on and on and on. It's huge (half the size of Switzerland according to Wikipedia).

Oh, an aside. I forgot that I stopped for a coffee at the Annaburroo Billabong where I chatted with an Aboriginal guy for ages about all sorts of things. We were standing next to a huge (live) crocodile that was behind a fence and he was explaining how one bit his uncle when his car broke. He also told me the names of various animals in his language (which I'm shamed to say I've forgotten) and told me to respect the human bones. He told me this quite a few times and I assured him that I would.

A one-armed Aboriginal chap then came up to me and tried to ask me the time by pointing at his non-existent wrist on his non-existent arm. That was confusing, but we sorted ourselves out after a while and after bidding each other Merry Christmas, I went on my way.

I was hungry by this point (having now missed breakfast and lunch), but kept moving East through the wetlands. There were kangaroos and wallabies everywhere. At one point, I felt like I was playing a dodgem game with these small red, furry bouncing creatures. I didn't hit any. I also just missed squashing a huge brown snake that decided to cross the road in front of me.

The amount of wildlife was incredible. There were huge eagles above, large water birds in the swamps, kangaroos everywhere, dingoes walking past, lizards on the road, parrots in the trees, buffaloes in the distance ...

I stopped at the Aurora Kakadu Resort on the "South Alligator river" because I'd spotted a sign for a bush walk. The walk was superb, but (I must admit) did make me a little nervous on my own. As far as I could tell (by the huge spider webs across the path) nobody else had been on this walk for a very long time. There was also a huge booming sound coming from the forest (which I can only explain by some very large bird nearby), there were lizards everywhere, lots of signs told me to beware of and not go near: 1) crocodiles, 2) dingoes, 3) kangaroos, 4) horses or 5) eagles.

I hope that some of the photos can give you a sense of what the walk was like (except you won't get to feel the humidity, flies or mosquitoes). The creature that, on first glance, looks like a black snake (in the photo below) is actually a turtle of some type! The billabong was beautiful and the area around was simply covered in wildlife of all types.

















Oh dear. I really don't know how to describe the scenery. Maybe I'll just say that it was hot, humid and amazing! In no particular order (certainly not in the order that I saw them) the photos below (or to the side - I can never work out where "blogger" is going to put them) are of some fungi that I spotted growing on a tree, two different species of butterfly (this is the first place that I've been to in Australia where there are lots of butterflies), a weird lizard that just sat watching me, two correlas in a tree and a huge cane toad (that I almost trod on).

































































After my walk I decided to keep driving a little further East before turning around to drive back to Darwin. I'm glad I did decide to keep going. The weather was perfect, the road was exciting (lots of holes to dodge with a 130km/hr speed limit). For most of the way the road was raised above the floodplain below. I stopped every-so-often to take photos of the magpie geese or cranes that were standing in the water. There were some rather strict signs (in English, German and Chinese!) telling me not to get close to the crocodiles.






























I kept driving until I reached the Mamukala Wetlands. So beautiful. A large bird-hide had been built in which I spent rather too long watching the storm clouds build in the distance and magpie geese flying around. I then went for another lovely walk around the lake. By this time I was hot, hungry and tired and so decided to turn around and head back to Darwin before the storms hit.

I didn't make it!! Driving home was dramatic. I kept getting swamped by huge rain storms that reduced visibility to basically zero and the wind pushed my car from side-to-side. I stopped at a road-house at about 3pm for Christmas lunch. All they had to offer me was an orange muffin (which admittedly tasted very good).


I got back to Darwin in time to visit the fish feeding. This is where milkfish, mullett, catfish, batfish and various rays (I spotted a shovel-nosed ray) come into the shallows to be hand fed. A huge batfish came and nibbled at my toes.

Afterwards I went for a swim in the hotel pool and then decided to have Christmas breakfast, lunch and dinner all rolled into one. I headed out looking for a pub that was open. Unfortunately I failed. I walked all around Darwin to discover that my choice was between Domino's pizza (to eat in my hotel room) or something from a seedy-looking cafe. I chose the cafe. Christmas dinner was a leg of chicken (ate without cutlery), fried rice and a soft drink.


What a wonderful Christmas!!

HAPPY CHRISTMAS TO YOU ALL.

Day 2: Litchfield National Park!

What a day! I woke ridiculously early, had breakfast at the "Duck's Nuts" (don't ask), covered myself in sunscreen and crocodile repellent(!) and then rented a car. It's not a very manly car. Everyone else was driving a ute (with a dog on the back), or a 50m-long road train, or a 4WD. I had a red hyundai. It was quite exciting getting in and realising that it was a manual. I haven't driven one of them since my driving test (a long time ago). Anyway, I only stalled once (and that was because I stopped suddenly so that I didn't end up squashing a huge frilled-lizard that was sitting in the road - and then tried to start up again in 5th gear). I don't recommend re-learning to drive a manual car in Darwin. There are traffic lights approximately every 10m (all of them are on red when you get up to them).

I drove to the Litchfield National Park and it was wonderful. I had the window down, Mozart on the radio and the speed limit was 130km/hr on the Stuart Highway (the same road that Joris, Christine and I were on in Alice Springs earlier this year). It was about 130km to Litchfield and took about 1.5 hours.



The park was amazing. You drive in past huge termite mounds that sit eerily in the forest. I pulled up at a viewing platform and had the most incredible view of thousands of termite mounds (all facing North-South) in a field. I had the whole place to myself. In fact, I think that I had the entire National Park to myself!! All I could hear were the cicadas, frogs and strange splashing sounds in the streams.














I continued my drive through the park for about another 30km before stopping near the "Tolmer Falls". I went on a hike. It was hot. There were cycads (Cycas calicola, if you're interested) everywhere!

I then went past a wonderful, rocky area with views down into a deep gully. There were caves everywhere which you're not allowed to enter because "Tolmer gorge is an important habitat for Orange Horseshoe Bats and Ghost Bats". Apparently there are also big pythons that eat the bats.


The Tolmer Falls were spectacular. Again I had the whole place to myself (by the way, in case you're not believing me - the photo above of me was taken by my camera using its time delay mode). I don't think that I managed to take a photo that showed how spectacular it really was. The river (which I had been walking next to) suddenly cascaded down into a gully. The walls seemed vertical and yet large trees were managing to grow from the rock. There was a huge cave next to the base of the falls and rainforest plants in the gorge.

The views in the other direction were just as incredible. At this point the land is very high (a "tabletop") and therefore the views over the countryside beyond were superb (basically forest until the horizon).




























I was rather hot and wet by this time (from the humidity) and so got back in the car to drive to "The Tabletop Swamp". This was my favourite place by far. Again, I was the only person around. There were heaps of butterflies, lizards, birds (egrets, birds of prey, parrots) and a huge swamp. I was convinced that every log was a crocodile and so kept well back from the edge.







I then continued my drive and ended up at the "Buley Rockhole" and set out on a 5km walk to the Florence Falls. I cannot keep describing everything as spectacular and superb, but it really was. I cooled off by dangling my legs in a creek until I heard a loud splash (admittedly if a crocodile had been there then I probably wouldn't have heard it anyway). The walk was beautiful, but very wet. I seemed to be walking down a river and did at least half of the walk without any shoes on.

I'm running out of things to say. It's all a blur now of green! I spotted a few wallabies, a huge wallaroo, some lizards, heaps of birds (I found a snake, but on closer inspection it was a twig - oh well).

I then drove back to the hotel in a ridiculous amount of rain. I stopped for a coffee in Noonamah and bought myself a stubby holder that says on it "Where the hell's NOONAMAH?". I took a wrong turning coming into Darwin (a bit difficult as there is only one main road). It was an interesting detour - past the docks and the Captain Cook National Park. I'm now about to have a swim before dinner.

Day 1 in Darwin

It's hot ... it's tropical ... I've dipped my toe into the Timor Sea! It's very exciting. I really didn't know what to expect at all on this trip. I woke much too early, packed and walked to Epping station. On the train I got into a long chat with an elderly lady all about Darwin (she used to be an air hostess) and she was the first person who didn't tell me that I was crazy going in the wet season. We were chatting away so much that I almost missed my stop, but I still managed to get to the airport about three hours early! I had even checked in 24 hours earlier over the web and so I had nothing to do except buy a magazine and have a relaxing breakfast and watch a Christmas tree walk around the airport playing carols on a saxophone!

The 4.5 hour flight was as wonderful as ever. I spent the entire time staring out the window at the red landscape below. About an hour out from Darwin it got much cloudier and the landscape beneath became greener. We landed on time, I grabbed my bag, got into a taxi, went to my hotel and then immediately grabbed my camera and went out for a walk. I got lost! But it was wonderful. The temperature was 32C, but it was (still is!) humid. I don't recognise any of the birds! They're stunning (see photos). I walked down to the bay, around the harbour area, into the town, got chatting (for a short time) with an Aboriginal chap about Christmas (he's going back home "to the Kakadu" and needed a permit for something). Like Alice Springs (and unlike Sydney) there are a large number of Indigenous people around the centre. In fact, I hardly saw anyone else. Darwin is incredibly quiet (at least during the middle of the day at this time of the year). I had an entire, stunning beach to myself where I picked up all sorts of shells and worried whether cone shells existed in Darwin or not (see this page).

I then walked through some mangrove swamps (including leaping over a creek which I carefully checked for crocodiles) to the incredible botanic gardens (and rested under a Calabash tree!) before heading back to the City (having walked about 15km in the heat by this point) to have a beer. I must have been dehydrated as the beer went straight to my head, but I did manage to stagger across the road, order another beer and a huge Barramundi from "Outback Jacks" opposite.

I then watched the sun set over the harbour with huge fruit bats flying overhead. Wonderful!

P.S. There has been no rain! I'm very confused.