the top end

Australia has six states and two territories, and I'm proud to say that I have now visited all of them. The last on my list was the Northern Territory, a place which proudly labels itself as "Outback Australia". Australia's top end certainly is a unique part of the world. Rather than write a big long entry describing everything I did, this entry will consist of a whole bunch of images in a roughly chronological order. Hopefully they'll serve to capture some of my impressions of the area.

After landing in Darwin, everything seemed foreign. I was embarassingly ignorant of the city and did no research on the town before I arrived. Other than heat, humidity and rain, I had no expectations of the place.

Everything I looked at was strangely unique. I'm not sure exactly what species of tree this is, but it looked different to anything else I'd ever seen before. It was in the garden outside of the Darwin Museum.


Being the wet season, I thought that there would be non-stop rain and thunder. However, clouds were few and far between during my first day in Darwin. The weather was hot and it would've been great to have had a swim, but the beaches didn't exactly look inviting. They were very beautiful and distinctly Australian, but looked as though they were a flashback into a far more primitive country. I wouldn't have been surprised to see a small dinosaur scurry across the red sand by the ocean. The water had a murkiness to it, and looked dangerous in a calm, brooding manner. The signs warning swimmers not to venture into the water due to the risk of box jellyfish did not look out of place in the least.




As the inevitable rain clouds rolled in, the water became more choppy. Ironically, it meant the waters became safer due to the lowered risk of stingers. At least, that was the reason given to me from a friend of my dad, a present local of Darwin, whom I was with when I took this photo. Despite this apparent lowered risk, we all agreed that the swimmers did appear a little foolhardy to be venturing into the water. Anything for a good wave, I suppose.


After wandering around Darwin a bit, it's "metropolitan" core seemed a little forced. The natural landscape still felt as though it dominated the mood of the city. I was travelling with a friend from Germany, and we spent a day cyling around the city. At one point, a group of aboriginal women were sitting in the middle of the bike path, and we walked the biked around them. They waved a genuinely friendly "hello" as we passed. The path didn't feel right to be there, it seemed a lot more natural for people to be sitting on the ground (even though these people had a couple of bottles of booze scattered around).

Speaking of booze, the following is a photo of the front page of the newspaper during one of the days we were in the Northern Territory. Slow news day, or do the locals just have different priorities?


For a place so heavily dominated by the natural environment, it's not surprising that the animals which inhabit the territory help give many locals a sense of identity. Impressive beasts are just another everyday part of life up north, and our tour guides rattled off interesting facts about the local fauna in a respectful but blasé manner.


We thought that it would be easiest to see Kakadu on a tour, and this is Pete, our Kakadu tour guide, with a frilled neck lizard in his hands. He gave a good job of giving the impression that he goes out and catches these lizards bare-handed every second day. The poor lizard happily scurried onto a termite mound as soon as it was released, thinking that we could no longer spot it.



The termites themselves are fairly incredible creatures. Our tour group couldn't help but pose for the obligatory tourist shot next to a massive "cathedral" termite mound, a type of mound which apparently grows at a rate of around 1m every ten years. The "magnetic" termite mounds were just as extraordinary. If I had stumbled upon them not knowing what they were, I'd probably have thought that I'd chanced upon a massive, ancient graveyard. The thin, wide mounds all align in the same direction. If the termites end up building a mound aligned in any other direction, they'll either recieve too little or too much sunlight during certain times of the day, and the colony won't survive.



Of course, if any animal is going to give the locals a sense of identity, it's going to be the man-eating saltwater crocodile. These people live with these monsters every day. Hear the one about the diver who was taken by the croc the other month? The one about the fellas who climbed up a tree to get away from a hungry croc, and saw the bastard swim by moments later with their best mate's body in its mouth? Hear the one about the German girl who got taken in a water hole when she was with her tour group? The locals have heard them all, and are not shy about telling their stories. The authorities seem to create their crocodile warning signs with a great sense of pride. The signs don't have it written down per se, but you get the idea: "This can be a dangerous land we live in, and we're proud of it".




Then again, who wouldn't derive some sense of satisfaction from knowing that they are allowed to survive side by side with these awesome animals? We went on a "jumping crocodile tour" on the first day of our trip to Kakadu, and were lucky enough to get a second boat ride when we took our one day tour to Litchfield National Park. On the tours, we travelled through crocodile infested waters, and bits of meat were dangled over the edge of the boat as soon as a crocodile was spotted. The wild crocs were baited into leaping for the food a couple of times before they eventually got hold of the meat. The first tour was in a fairly big, enclosed boat, and we saw 5 metre long crocodiles leaping for meat safely from behind glass windows. On the second tour, we travelled on a distinctly smaller vessel without any glass windows cutting us off from the real world, where we could freely dangle our hands over the water if we so chose. It was fairly exciting to see the "small" 2.5 metre crocodiles clambering up the side of the boat to get at the food. It was something else altogether seeing "Hannibal", the 5.5 metre long cannibalistic king of the river, attacking the engine of our little motor boat.





The natural landscape of Kakadu is no less impressive than the beasts found within the area. It's easy to be consumed by the mood of the bushland when walking through it. The reverence that you gain from walking through the bush is amplified when you emerge out of the bushland into a lookout, and see the trees extend as far as your eyes can see.




The rocks that jut out of the earth give the region an unmistakable character. Ancient aboriginal rock art lies scattered amongst the red stone, tattooing the land with remnants of a lost culture.








The brooding power and beauty of Kakadu come together spectacularly when the rain pelts down. One of the highlights of the trip for me was when we drove through the middle of a massive tropical storm, the windscreen wipers swatting furiously at a barrage of rain, thunder and lighting crashing around us. The next day, we climbed to the top of a lookout and saw dark clouds roll in ominously over the lush landscape.



The rain brings a luscious green with it. On one of our walks, we stood atop pillars of stone jutting out of the fresh earth. The lakes looked like massive puddles, and life seemed to be teeming amongst the exotic vegetation.






I had been a little hesistant about seeing Kakadu on a tour group. I expected that by joining a group, everything would be more sanitized and disjointed from what was really out there. I dreaded being overwhelmed by the finger-pointing tourist syndrome that tends to accompany groups of people. Thankfully, the tour was far from cold and sanitized. We plowed around in the back of a 4WD, roughed it by sleeping in tents, had infrequent showers despite the sticky weather, and frequently used trees as toilets. Our tour guide was a true local. He didn't seem overwhelmingly well read on the region, but he did have a wealth of simple, interesting common knowledge about his backyard that was evidently picked up over years of living in the area, which gave the tour a feeling of authenticity. The people on the tour were young, friendly, and out to have fun, and everyone's spirits stayed high. Even when our 4WD conked out (it had nothing to do with the river that we had just driven through) and we were waiting for a tow in the rain, it was all just part of the little adventure that we were sharing in.