Top End

From Australia

My journey from Gili Air, Indonesia to Darwin, Australia went like this:

• wake at dawn with the chickens and take horse cart from bungalow to harbor
• board public boat which is just a biggish canoe lest you get grand ideas by my words, to the island of Lombok by wading through the water and climbing in, stupidly wearing a skirt
• take another horse cart to a minibus "station," which is a guesthouse with a space for a minivan to park
• take minibus ride for 2 hours to a port in Lombok whose name I never caught.  The ride was beautiful, complete with monkeys hanging out on the shoulder of the road
• bake in the Indonesian sun for 40 minutes waiting for the slow boat to Bali
• spend 6 hours crossing the incredibly deep waters separating Bali and Lombok (the fast boat takes no more than an hour and a half but costs at least three times as much).  I paid a dollar extra to sit in air conditioning, but my comfort was compromised by the "professional karaoke" show going on in the same room.  One man playing the synthesizer and one young, heavily made-up woman singing all kinds of songs, many in Indonesian but she made time for Lionel Richie's "Hello" and Sinatra's "My Way".  No one seemed to enjoy any of it except for the performers and the crew, some of whom took the stage themselves.
• walk to another minibus and board it for a 90 minute ride to the airport
• take a 5 hour flight to Darwin that landed at 3am
• crawl into the top bunk of a 4 person hostel room at 5am

Good times, right? 
It was pretty draining, but it could have been worse.  I left Gili Air a bit before 9am and made it to the airport in Bali about 12 hours later.  Aside from cost, I chose the slow option because there wasn't much point in getting to the airport at noon when my flight was at 11pm.  I had been assured that the journey would take about 6 hours, which meant I would still have plenty of time to kill.  As it was, it took double that; had anything gone wrong, I don't think I would have made my flight!

Darwin is in Australia's Northern Territory and is itself in the northern part of that.  They call the region the Top End, and it's full on tropical.  Just coming out of the wet season, it's very warm but not humid.  It's a party town too.  My first night I joined my roomie, a young 20 something Irish chippie (carpenter), and some of his friends for beers.  I went to bed around 11 as things just started to get out of hand.  Little did I know that my roomie would be bringing a girl back to the room at 5am (alcohol is served until 4am here!).  I woke up as they came in, but it took a few moments to realize he wasn't alone.  Now, I know I'm an old fart, but that is not cool to do in a dormitory situation.  Once awake, of course, I had to use the toilet.  I was torn between trying to ignore that need and the sounds coming from below and going back to sleep or being the party-pooper and relieving myself of all my problems, wordlessly.  Guess which won out.

The main reason I visited Darwin was to check out Kakadu, which is Australia's largest national park and a world heritage site.  Covering around 5 million acres, it is home to 68 mammals, over 120 reptiles, 26 kinds of frogs, over 300 variety of fish, more than 2000 plants and over 10,000 insects (and I think I sighted half of those).  The Aboriginal people who lived in this area also left rock paintings over many sites.  In fact, the Bininj/Mungguy people own Kakadu now.  They lease it to the Australian federal government who run it as a park, under the condition that the sacred spots and those most environmentally sensitive are off-limits to visitors.  It's one of the very few world heritage sites listed for both its cultural and natural values.

Still, there is plenty to see and do, and my short two days there didn't come close to completing the list.  I did see some pretty amazing things though.  We viewed rock paintings that are tens of thousands of years old, some positioned on the bottom of rock overhangs that no one can explain how they got there.  The Bininj would say the Mimi (pron. mummy) spirits, who are Creation Ancestors, put them there, and no one really has a better guess.  We climbed up Ubir rock to get a panoramic view, which is breathtaking.  Kakadu encompasses six different habitats from woodlands to forests to hills to sandstone plateaus to tidal flats to floodplains, and you can see at least 4 of them from that spot.  We climbed up to pristine waterfalls with plunge pools that only flow for a month or so more, which made me realize that I had accidentally visited Kakadu at possibly the best time.  At the very beginning of the dry season, things are still green, the floodplains are still wet, the waterlilies bloom in the billabongs, and the waterfalls flow.

Speaking of billabongs, we did a tour of Corroboree Billabong on the Mary River.  I had always lazily wondered what a billabong was.  Certainly, I could have looked it up, but I waited until a crusty old Aussie biologist informed me on his boat.  Loosely translated, it means "always water", so it's a place where there is always freshwater, usually a dead-end channel off a river.  About a dozen of us clambered on the boat, and the COAB, who never introduced himself, told us that there was only one rule.  We couldn't change seats.  If we did, the boat might tip over, and these waters were crawling with salties, the lingo for saltwater crocodiles, who are more appropriately called estuarine crocs anyway.  The boat is quite flat, I gather, so that it can maneuver the shallow depths of the billabong.  The rule barely mattered because I was glued to my seat, avidly watching away.  We did see a saltie, all 3 meters of him, and that's small for salties.  But I found the birds even more interesting.  Although COAB assured us this was a poor bird showing this year, due to lots of rain and food still being available further south.  Even a poor showing is pretty stupendous here.  Eagles, kites, jabirus, some scarlet-headed little thing, flocks of cockatoos, and many more whose names I don't know, only I haven't created acronyms for them like COAB.

When I was researching tours of Kakadu, I balked at the prices, which are not anywhere on the cheap end of things.  But I had principally come to Darwin to see Kakadu, and the chances of my getting to Darwin again are not reliably high (it's still a 7 hour flight from Sydney).  So I took a deep breath, plopped down my credit card, and enjoyed the thing from start to finish.  If you ever find yourself in the Top End, do the same.

I'm now in Cairns, Queensland, the jumping off point for yet another of Australia's world heritage sites, the Great Barrier Reef.  I've plopped my credit card down again for a standby spot on a 5 day diving liveaboard on the northern end of the Reef.  Most daytrips and shorter liveaboards trips do the bit close to Cairns, but we'll be going further up where the reef is still relatively pristine.  Once again, I got lucky.  Arriving on Wednesday, I had already booked two nights here in Cairns.  I had read that standby spots were available on liveaboards for substantial discounts, so I was keeping an eye out.  I wanted a longer trip, and I wanted to go further north.  Lo and behold, a boat leaving on Friday had a spot.  I had to take it.  I can't imagine I'll be able to post from there, so, my dear readers, I will update you on the diving when I get back next week.