JULY 26 - 28 PREVIOUS | NEXT | HOME | CONTENTS | ABOUT | SEND EMAIL Broadspan Buffalo, Tracy's Toytown Sunday, July 26; Katherine - Darwin Our bus wasn't leaving for Darwin until the afternoon, so we spent the morning pottering around the town. This activity consisted of walking up the main street and back, keeping a leisurely pace in the shady stretches, and not lingering overlong in the toasting patches exposed to the sun. We oriented ourselves at the town's Visitor Information Centre. Walking out through the car park at the end of our visit, I mused on the fact that during the flood, the ground under my feet had been covered in water 3.3 metres deep. Even if Denise had stood on my shoulders, she wouldn't have been able to keep her head fully above the water. The heat of our new climate prompted us to make a purchase; in a dried-out sports store (we looked sympathetically through its flood aftermath photographs) we bought a large army-style canvas pack in which to store our winter clothes. Judging by recent conditions, we wouldn't be needing them for a while, so we could just leave them in the pack and avoid the Herculean task of re-packing our hereto overfilled backpacks every time we moved from place to place. Only one question - who would carry it? Today's McCafferty's drivers were downright nice. The toilet speech was kept to a minimum and they assumed we had enough intelligence to figure out how the reclining seats worked ourselves. The video was still terrible though, some Disney children's flick about saving an elephant during the Vietnam war. If I was Walt, I would have stayed well away from making happy ending movies about Vietnam, but the poor taste was lost on the little girl sitting in the front seat who enjoyed the film immensely. We stopped at a (or perhaps "the"?) roadhouse in Adelaide River and saw Charlie the Buffalo, who starred in the hit 1980's movie "Crocodile Dundee." Charlie the buffalo. The horns on Charlie's head are enormous (I am tempted to use the word "hornspan" to describe their width but I doubt whether Oxford would allow me such an indiscretion). Suffice it to say that Charlie's horns are very wide. Charlie also demonstrated to us that he can stick his tongue up each of his nostrils. An invaluable talent to be sure, which had the double effect of impressing me and convincing me that Charlie was not a pompous or a pretentious buffalo, but a regular down-to-earth herbivore, unaffected by the glamour and glitz of the movie industry. His candid attitude had earned him much respect and many friends, including a kangaroo (the retired Skippy the Bush Kangaroo perhaps?) who shared his pen and was obligingly scratching Charlie's nose as we departed. We pulled into Darwin at about 5pm. It was very warm and humid, significantly more so than it had been in Katherine, but nothing compared to average wet season levels. Gazing out of the bus window on the way into the city I saw a modern, shiny metropolis with tidy high-rises and neat highway interchanges. The sudden transition from outback to suburbia to city centre struck home the fact that although we were entering a decent-sized city, it was a city out on its own, thousands of miles from any centres of population of comparable size. Darwin originated as a strategic outpost, a planned settlement by the South Australian government to mark their claim to the northern regions of the continent and to deter other nations from taking an interest in what would otherwise have been unguarded territory. Darwin still fills that role today, as well as acting as the administrative centre for the Northern Territory. I got the impression that Darwin exists only because there needs to be a city in Australia's Top End. The modern feel, the quiet streets, and the large number of undeveloped sites scattered throughout the city gave me the feeling that the city is still waiting for the rest of its residents to arrive. The city certainly drinks more than its size would suggest - at 230 litres annually, the people of Darwin have the highest annual per capita consumption of beer in Australia. On Christmas Day 1974, Darwin was devastated by Cyclone Tracy. I remember seeing a dramatised film based on the disaster when I was a child. Although I didn't even know where Darwin was back then, I felt great sympathy for the characters with the funny accents whose Christmas was ruined. When houses started getting torn to pieces by the cyclone and when hiding in the bathtub couldn't even save the terrified characters from the huge winds, I recall wondering why anybody would want to live in such a place. I was baffled by the fact that nobody else in Australia knew what was going on in Darwin until after the cyclone had ended, and I couldn't figure out why they built their houses with matchwood. Hadn't they read "The Three Little Pigs"? Our plan was to spend the night in Darwin, and join a three-day tour to Kakadu National Park early the following morning. After checking into our hostel, we set out to explore. We walked along the street into which the Stuart Highway had narrowed and presently came to its end. That was it. We were as far north as we were going to get. I felt a little sad that we had come to the end of the Stuart Highway, which had borne us all of the way from Adelaide, and disappointed that the highway petered out so unceremoniously. Beyond the asphalt the sun was setting over the Indian Ocean. We walked along the Esplanade towards the centre of the city and, after much deliberation, ate a barbecue dinner in a pub on Smith Mall. Five dollars for a beer and as many burgers, sausages, and chicken wings and as much bread and salad as you could eat, plus the Simpsons on a big screen. Can't beat that - O Lordy I'm in Heaven already. Tour Three, Ecology Everywhere, Tiny the Tosser Monday, July 27; Darwin - Point Stuart I munched on toast and marmalade on the unlit balcony outside the kitchen, watching for the arrival of our Northern Territory Adventure Tours guide. The darkness and warmth of the tropical morning was disconcerting - I could have sworn that it was still the previous evening and that I hadn't slept for more than a few minutes. Few cars passed on the street in front of the hostel, and the other backpackers eating breakfast at this early hour were as quiet as I, lost in thought and unsure if or why they were really awake. Before long, a 4-wheel drive bus and trailer pulled up outside the gate. Denise and I hauled our backpacks out onto the street, as did another young couple from our hostel. A capable-looking woman in her late twenties rounded the front of the bus and introduced herself to us as Justine, our guide for the next three days. She was wearing hiking boots, a pair of khaki shorts and a matching shirt, emblazoned with the tour company's distinctive logo. She checked off our names on her clipboard, and indicated where we should put our backpacks. Almost at once, I could hear an urgency in her voice, as if she was in a hurry. Initially I balked at such an attitude, for on Wayward we had never rushed and I had grown to believe that that was the best way to tour. However, Justine seemed to merely be preoccupied with the logistics of collecting all of her passengers from their respective accommodations. We were the first hostel on her route. We climbed aboard the bus, whose rugged design and high ground clearance required us to use a fold-out step to reach the raised floor level of the interior. For the next half hour we toured the hotels and hostels of Darwin picking up our travel companions, before heading eastwards out of the city. There were both young and old passengers on the trip, 17 of us in total. One American, four Australians, two Irish, two Swiss, two English and six Dutch travellers comprised the group. The youngest passengers on the bus were the two adolescent sons of a Dutch couple, while the eldest were a retired Australian man and his wife. It was clear from the outset that there would be a wide disparity in attitudes and capabilities amongst us. Having learned the importance of getting a good tour group from the trips I had joined thus far, I had a bad feeling about the ability of this particular bunch to bond. Kakadu National Park is second only to Uluru as Australia's most visited destination. The park is an unspoiled haven of life and culture in the Top End, covering an area of 20,000 square kilometres and drained by the erroneously named South Alligator River (there are no alligators in Australia, only crocodiles; a bungling British explorer's faux pas). Kakadu contains a large variety of different ecological habitats - woodlands, wetlands, monsoon forest, and swamps provide a home for hundreds of species of birds, plants, fish, reptiles, and over 10,000 types of insect, many of which cannot be found anywhere else in the world. The area has been home to Aboriginal people for more than 50,000 years, evidenced by one of the most extensive collections of rock art in the world. Like Uluru, the park is collectively managed today by its traditional owners and the Australian National Parks and Wildlife Service (ANPWS). Kakadu is a listed World Heritage Area; one of the few in the world that has been recognised for both its cultural and its natural heritage. In addition to this official accreditation, my older sister Audrey, who had visited Kakadu a couple of years earlier, had recommended it as the best place she had visited in all Australia. That was no small endorsement - Audrey and her boyfriend had coaxed a beaten-up old car around the entire continent and seen more of Australia than most. As we left Darwin behind, Justine outlined our itinerary. It emerged that our first day and night would not be spent in Kakadu at all; instead we would be visiting equally interesting places beyond the western edge of the park. I didn't doubt her - the park border is merely a line drawn on a map. She listed off excursions and strange place names, some of which I had heard and read about, and others that I was content to visit uninformed. Our first stop was at Fogg Dam Conservation Reserve. Although it was always a teeming tangle of flora and fauna (it has been an Aboriginal larder for thousands of years), the calibre of the wetlands reserve was redoubled as a side-effect of the Fogg Dam's construction, which intended to create an experimental region for growing cotton and rice in the 1950s. Horticultural experts colluded with regional economic developers in what they believed would be a successful and lucrative industry for Australia's agriculturally poor Top End. The economic and political backers had ambitious plans for the project, but their attempts were ultimately unsuccessful. Unpredictable rainfall, poor administration, scant infrastructure, distance from markets and a lack of sufficient agricultural knowledge of the area contributed to the failure of the scheme, as did the region's magpie geese and other birds who fed heartily on the growing rice plants and snatched aerially sown seeds before they even hit the ground. The businessmen eventually gave in, and Mother Nature chalked a rare one up for herself in her ongoing battle with man and his concept of development. A strange and wonderful insect (i.e. it didn't try to bite me.) I'm not a raving student of flora and fauna, and never have been. I don't know the difference between a swimming trout and salmon, I can't identify a bird from its song, I uproot treasured perennials when I am weeding my mother's flower beds, and my only insect collection is on my car windshield. But the Top End was different. There were no glass cases filled with dried butterflies, no faded drawings of lanky birds and no limp flower petals pressed between the pages of a book. There were no iron bars, no protective moats and no cages. We were just another species in the habitat, and an abundance of life teemed nonchalantly around us as if to mock our biblically-appointed designation as lords of the earth. I saw several types of birds feeding out in the marshland, including some jabiru, Australia's black and white version of the flamingo. I saw a large lizard-like reptile which I learned was a sand-monitor, a type of goanna, but unfortunately it scrambled away into the long grass before I could say hello. Colourful dragonflies and butterflies abounded, as did less desirable houseflies. There were mosquitoes too, some so large that I imagined they would need a runway to land, but I was mistaken, for they landed on me quite easily and proceeded to tuck in. We visited an interpretive centre called Window on the Wetlands, whose design is supposed to compliment the surrounding Adelaide river floodplains. The roof is allegedly shaped like the wings of one of the local birds. I must have been looking at it from the wrong direction, because all I could see were tiles. I was just getting into a documentary video on the region's life cycle in the centre when Justine called us all back into the bus. I was again noticing a rushed manner in our tour that was not present, or at least not evident on our Wayward Bus trip. The pace was unavoidable, however, as we were attempting to tour an area the size of Wales in less than three days on a scant network of bone-shaking roads, many of which were unsealed and permitted 4-wheel drive access only. After a brief stop at a roadhouse near Corroboree Park, we headed east along the Arnhem highway until we were driving through a landscape spotted with termite mounds, some of them almost three metres tall. Termite fortress. We pulled in where the mounds were most concentrated and spent a while looking around the clusters of wrinkled grey hives. I examined them in awe, but not without a few unsettling thoughts about the millions of termites crawling around in the darkness within the towering structures. The mounds are built from grass, mud, and the accumulated saliva of millions of the tiny crawling industrialists. The walls of the cylindrically-shaped mounds are folded on themselves like heavy curtains pushed aside, as the clever termite engineers have found that the extra surface area and shade that this provides helps regulate the temperature inside. Indeed, Justine informed us that at different times of the day, the termites congregate at different places in the mound, depending on where the temperature is most comfortable. It is estimated that large termite mounds are inhabited and growing for 50 to 100 years before being deserted and eventually decaying, something to do with the lack of a replacement for the queen of the mound. Contrary to the clear instructions on a nearby sign, Justine broke off a fingernail-sized piece of a mound so that we could take a look at its residents. The sudden shaft of bright sunlight streaming into the lightproof, waterproof and fireproof mound brought tens of red soldier termites scurrying out to investigate and seal the breach. I could see the tiny leaves of grass embedded in the internal walls of the mound, creating an edible residence that Hansel and Gretel would have killed for. "Men, we've got a Class 5 breach in Sector 13-G. All hands to emergency repair stations, and bring your saliva!" Following Justine's suggestion, I placed my finger close to the small hole that she had made in the mound. The termites attacked me with their only means of defence - they spat on my finger. I couldn't feel it and I couldn't see it, but when I retracted my threatening finger I could smell the sweet substance that they used to protect their mound against ants. We left the stressed-looking termites dashing around in what looked to us like an apparent state of havoc, but was no doubt an evolved social and industrial ritual optimised towards the rapid repair of their fortress. We jolted across washboard roads to a small and remote campsite outside Point Stuart where permanently pitched cabin tents containing iron-framed stretcher bunks awaited us. Several of our group played a halting game of volleyball in the shaded swimming pool. The upper hand was unashamedly maintained by those in the shallow end, so after swallowing mouthfuls of water during desperate dives for the ball I (equally unashamedly) defected from the deep end to join them. I subsequently landed on the younger Dutch kid during a particularly heroic lunge for the ball, but in a gracious show of team spirit and international solidarity, his older brother and father forgave me with smiles and nods before the kid had even stopped spluttering. After lunch I plastered myself with a gallon of sunscreen and a gallon of insect repellent for our upcoming foray into a monsoon vine forest. The resulting creamy but tangy fragrance of the blended coating on my skin was not unpleasant, a sort of Tommy Hilfiger body shield. The edge of the forest was just across the field from our campsite, so we trekked single-file into the trees after Justine. Perhaps I should have smeared another gallon of insect repellent into the mix on my cruelly exposed skin, or maybe it was just sheer force of bug numbers, but the mozzies, flies, and other insects arrived upon us and decided to stay. I think they invited their cousins and neighbours too. It was extremely irritating at first (I have a low tolerance for biting and stinging insects) but my demeanour evolved to an air of general annoyance and eventually, resignation. I was trespassing on their territory, wandering through a dense and humid tropical forest strewn with shallow pools and muddy troughs. I resolved to concentrate on the positive. Justine's practised commentary and quick eyes made this task much easier. She first pointed out a large female spider known as a golden-orb weaver, waiting motionlessly for prey in the centre of a broad web. Her body and legs were as large as my outstretched hand and her black and yellow colouring were like no spiders I have ever found (or indeed, hope to find) in my basement. The violently unromantic female golden orb weaver. I pitied the unfortunate male who would attempt to mate with her. The male golden-orb weavers are only one-tenth of the size of the females, and have to try and fulfil their sexual mission without getting killed and eaten by the psychotic, frigid females. Researchers postulate that the male is small so that he can creep lightly across the web to the unsuspecting female and carry out his business before she knows what hit her. I felt that the male would have been a lot happier with the evolution of his species if the female were a little friendlier and he was a lot bigger. Always trying to be open to both sides of any story, I considered the female's position. Perhaps she is pissed off with the way thing went evolution-wise too. She probably just needs satisfaction, and is waiting for Mr. Big Boy spider to come along and ease her frustrations. Instead she is pestered by countless small pecker suitors coming along, making her pregnant, and running away as fast as their legs can carry them. No wonder she is annoyed. Another animal's life story was reduced to a dance of courtship and passion a little farther down the alleged trail. Justine led us to a cone-shaped mound of dead leaves and forest debris among a stand of tall and slender trees. The mound looked like the piled-up excavations of an earthmover, about 15 feet across and eight feet tall, but we were informed that it was the home of an orange-footed scrubfowl. I have no idea what an orange-footed scrubfowl looks like but I picked up some romancing tips from Justine's account of their courting practices (if scientists make their greatest breakthroughs by learning from nature, why can't I get a few pointers to use on a night out?) The male scrubfowl builds leaves and brush into the most stylish mound he can manage, and lounges around waiting for females to pass his door. If a female is suitably impressed by his bachelor pad, she will venture inside for a look and stay to raise the resulting family. Once the children have all grown up and moved away and the parents have retired to a more manageable mound in Florida, one of the eligible boys comes home to the mound, does a bit of renovation and adds an extension. Then he tries to attract a female like his wild-eyed father and the cycle repeats. The mound we saw was large by orange-footed scrubfowl standards, estimated at 50 years old or more. Nearby was a Banyan vine tree, another clever piece of nature of which I had been heretofore unaware. The tree begins life as a seed which is deposited by birds, wind or otherwise onto the bough of another tree. The developing Banyan vine grows both upwards and downwards from the seed until its vinelike roots reach the nourishing earth. Once this is accomplished, it turns really nasty and strangles the unfortunate host tree. Charming. Towards the end of our walk, we came across an ant highway complete with entry and exit ramps, junctions and tunnels. From the volume of traffic scurrying to and fro it looked like rush hour. I made a few attempts at creating detours with leaves but the harried commuters disregarded the obstacles and went under or over them without missing a step. Protesting vehemently, I was pulled away from my engrossing traffic engineering to reboard the bus. The imaginatively named Rock Hole Billabong was our next stop, where we were scheduled to take a boat cruise. A billabong is actually a waterhole in a dry river bed, but looks to an unsuspecting Irish tourist like a regular lake. Our boat was a shallow flat-bottomed aluminium affair, open at the sides but with a canvas roof to shade us from the sun. After we had climbed in and almost filled the boat, it sat low enough in the billabong so that I could reach out and touch the water. The tub was powered by a huge growling outboard engine. A small aluminium locker near the stern may have once served as a toilet, but the skipper informed us that it was off-limits. He probably had good reason for this, perhaps a previous passenger had died from the smell after using the pit within - I can only imagine the stench that could mature in the closed metal can during the heat of the day. Speaking of shits, our skipper and guide for the ninety-minute cruise was a guy calling himself Tiny. Stocky and well-rounded, the name certainly didn't refer to his physical stature, and we quickly found out that it didn't refer to the size of his ego either. Barely out of his teens, he jabbered on almost as much about himself and his achievements as about the wildlife during the cruise, and although he did identify the surrounding flora and fauna as well as finding us some saltwater crocodiles, his wildlife commentary was unprofessional and came across as an inconvenient aside to the central theme of the day, i.e. himself. Ignoring Tiny, I concentrated on the scene around us. More jabiru lined the banks of the billabong, a stork cleaned itself by the water's edge, and a large flock of snow-white cockatoos leapt from the branches of a tree in magnificent unity as we approached. The crocodiles however, stole the show. "Salties" are the world's biggest reptiles and can grow to six metres in length. They have nothing to fear in nature except each other and contrary to their name, inhabit both saltwater and freshwater. A saltwater crocodile that actually moved (honestly!) Exceptional predators, they attack with bursts of speed and strength that are in stark contrast to their lethargic manner at most other times. Hungry saltwater crocodiles have no problem attacking swimming humans or those who stray within lunging distance of a riverbank, and will even tackle buffalo who get stuck in mud by the water's edge. Incidents of saltwater crocodile attacks on humans are thankfully rare, but the prudent, of which I was one, take no chances. The salties that we saw were lying motionlessly at different points along the bank of the billabong, warming their cold-blooded leathery bodies in the sun. One of them, a well fed-looking fellow about three metres in length, scrabbled from the sand into the water as we approached and glided sneakily and effortlessly through the shallows. In an instant, all that was visible above the water were a pair of small nostrils and his eerie eyes, gleaming in the late afternoon light. Tiny nudged the boat into reverse and backed away, leaving the disturbed crocodile to himself while we continued down the billabong. Sunset over Rock Hole Billabong. Drifting past giant water lilies, I could see a miniature world of insects too busy with their own ecosystem to worry about the giant predators swimming and basking nearby. Too busy to bite me too, which I appreciated even more. We ended the trip watching the fiery sun go down over the billabong and afterwards rejoined Justine on the shore. She whisked us back to the campsite and we cooked a barbeque and got to know each other in our mosquito-netted kitchen tent. Unfortunately all of the insects seemed to be trapped in the tent with us, and zipped about drunkenly, doubly intoxicated by the acres of blood-rich skin and dazzling camping lamps in their own idea of paradise. Lots of Lurching, Fabulous Falls, Lots More Lurching Tuesday, July 28; Point Stuart - Yellow Waters Our early starts with Wayward Bus were put to shame by Northern Territory Adventure Tours - we loaded onto the bus in the darkness shortly after 4:30am. We took a bone-shaking route into Kakadu on the old Darwin road although I was so sleepy I managed to doze most of the way. I do remember jolting awake at one point when the bus tilted steeply forward - I opened my eyes to find us rumbling down a bank and through a dried-up riverbed; it was almost daylight and our headlights were weakening spots of yellow on the opposite bank. We lurched backwards as our front wheels hit the incline and bounced about as the momentum which Justine had maintained carried us up the opposite embankment. The rest of the trip was a hazy collection of half-dreamt images featuring endless forest and dusty roads, grey in the pre-dawn light. We reached our destination, a resort campsite at Yellow Waters shortly after 7am. There were more cabin tents set up for us here, so we unpacked and made breakfast. It was strange to be eating breakfast among the other campers on the site who had just clambered out of their tents, while we had driven for a couple of hours already. After breakfast I felt like somebody had pushed "reset" and we were starting our day again, as if the 4:30am start had been too much to take and was declared null and void. It was no good though, for our second attempt at the day began just like the first - we all clambered onto the bus and took off down a bumpy and dusty track into the forest. At least the sun was up. The day's itinerary looked good. Our plan was to take in the most spectacular waterfalls in Kakadu - Twin Falls and Jim Jim Falls. Unfortunately it would take us a significant part of the day to reach both sets of falls, which are located about 10km from each other at the end of a rough 4-wheel drive track. Not for the fainthearted: The 4WD track to Jim Jim and Twin Falls It took us two hours to cover the 60km to Twin Falls from the highway, much of which was spent crawling along a single-vehicle track that had more turns than a spool of yarn and bigger craters than an atom bomb test site. We were introduced to a new frequency and intensity of jarring and lurching. The track was barely wide enough for our bus and more than once I swore we were going to pitch into a tree, but we always seemed to just graze their branches. Passing by another vehicle required much forethought and a well-timed detour off the track into the trees. Some of the turns looked like a particularly devious or drunken road builder had put them there for fun, but on further thought I concluded that there could have been no such road builder, for there certainly wasn't anything worth calling a road. We crossed through a creek where the water sloshed under the cabin door and onto the lower step. We ascended slowly up the far bank. Losing momentum, we hung motionless for a brief instant while the strained clutch considered our fate. We made it to the top, but only just. Eventually we reached a clearing at the end of the track where half-a-dozen battered LandCruisers and other 4-wheel drives baked in the mid-morning sun. Justine parked in the best available shade underneath some trees to try and keep the bus cool, but it was pointless - as soon as the overworked air-conditioning shut off, it became an oven inside. We prepared to cover the final kilometre or so to the falls, which would require both walking and swimming - there was no way to reach their base except by water. I scurried along the exposed path to the river's edge, firmly convinced that the hole in the ozone layer was directly above Kakadu and that the sun was falling through it. The crystal clear river emerged from between the towering black walls of a monsoon-forested gorge, gliding quietly and self-assuredly past us. A sign nearby warned us against the small possibility of saltwater crocodiles in the river, despite netting downstream and thorough, regular checks upstream by park management. Swimming was at our own risk. It was not a sign to be taken lightly, but Justine rattled off some statistics about the number of people that safely visit Twin Falls every year and I figured that I had a greater chance of getting hit by a bus (no, not in the river). The retired couple in our group predictably chose to stay behind. I pulled the elastic strap of my waterproof camera onto my wrist, coated myself with another layer of waterproof sunscreen, and jumped into the water. Resurfacing, I counted my limbs - one, two, three, four - all there, no crocs about yet anyway. Out in the middle of the river, I could see up through the gorge, and in the distance, the twin towers of cascading water that marked our destination. The relaxed swim upriver was just short of a kilometre and was absolutely delightful. Cool water, warm sunshine, a remote adventure in a magnificent gorge, the entire afternoon before us and the sense of freedom gained by leaving all of my tourist paraphernalia behind - no backpack, no map, no sunglasses, no wallet, no guidebook, not even my beloved sandals - it felt great. The unclouded water revealed a contoured underwater landscape of smoothed rocks when I paused and let the ripples around me subside. Twin Falls. Being able to see the rocks led me into a false sense of security, and I stubbed my toes on several of the more prominent boulders while my brain argued with my eyes about how much the water refracted what I was seeing. There were fish in the water too, although they were far too wary of my size and too ashamed at my lack of aquatic grace to come anywhere near me. We had to climb out of the river, onto a beach and over some rocks halfway through the ascent upriver, but the body of water on the far side opened into a plunge pool that reached up to the base of the double falls. Reaching the falls was worth every step and every stroke. Plunging about 30 metres, the whitewater splashed and bounced its way down the gleaming wall into the pool as two separate channels. The pool itself was enclosed by equally high rock walls except for the cleft through which we had entered. Its undulating floor of fine sand reached up to form a golden beach alongside the falls, where I lounged for the brief period when I wasn't playing in the water. I swam to the base of the waterfall channel that plunged into a deep pool Power Shower: The view up Twin Falls. (the other channel dropped into water shallow enough to wade in) and backed up until I was directly underneath the cascading water. It was exhilarating - the king of all power showers. Its thundering roar assaulted my ears, and I could feel nothing except the tremendous pressure of the water as it pounded on my head and my back, trying to force me down and away to the relative calm of the surrounding pool. Trying to tread water, I felt like I was advancing head first into the jet of a firehose. Beneath an offshoot of Twin Falls. There were alcoves in the rock curtained off by cascading water that demanded exploration, and shallow sandbars in the plunge pool that cradled me in sun drenched water. I had a water fight with Denise and tried my hand at bodyboard surfing from the beach. Despite the humiliation suffered during both of these activities, I enjoyed them immensely. We stayed at the falls for over an hour, but it seemed like ten minutes. When I was called to go, I hung back to gaze in awe at the beautiful gorge and only reluctantly began the swim downriver. Back at the baked bus, we ate another insect-accompanied meal in the relentless sunshine - I had to double-check when making my sandwich that there were no insects trapped between my ham and cheese slices, and that the mayonnaise hadn't become a graveyard for drowned bugs. Having seen too many Saturday morning cartoons in my youth, I half expected our picnic to be carried away by an army of ants marching to the beat of an eager drummer, but thankfully the tomatoes, cucumbers and other foodstuffs stayed right where we put them. We backtracked towards Jim Jim Falls, which at 215 metres high, makes Twin Falls look like a gentle cascade. Well it would do, if there happened to be any water coming over the falls. It was well into the dry season and Jim Jim had dried up. A short hike along a rocky forested trail ended at the edge of a large and dark pool from where we could make out where Jim Jim should have been - a series of long black streaks painting the cliff wall on the far side of the crocodile-patrolled water. I had known the falls would be dry, but it came as a disappointment anyway. We were not one of the lucky few who get to see Jim Jim Falls during the six brief weeks in the year at the beginning of the dry season when they are both accessible and flowing. Most tour companies fail to mention this hiccup to prospective customers in their brochures. An honest mistake I'm sure. I dozed intermittently on our rolling jaunt back towards Yellow Waters. The sinking sun warmed the rocky Arnhemland Escarpment which jutted out of the forest on our right, marking the boundary of the Aboriginal-owned wilderness after which it is named. Our 4WD bus, with Arnhemland Escarpment in the background. Arnhemland is enormous, comprising the eastern half of the Top End of Australia, although it is home to only a few thousand Aborigines. They prefer to be left alone, and industries such as mining, forestry, and tourism have been controlled to ensure their privacy. Access into Arnhemland is virtually impossible for tourists travelling independently. Even when travelling on restricted tours, permits are limited and very expensive. Arnhemland is the Bel-Air of Australia. For dinner I ate enough stir-fry chicken and rice to feed an army, and afterwards regretted it. Feeling heavy and sleepy, I couldn't stay in the stuffy kitchen tent, so I headed up to the terrace of the resort pub for a beer with my fellow travellers. Our Dutch companions were already there, swigging heavily from their Heineken substitutes, but I didn't last long. At least I managed to stay up later than the retired Australian couple with whom we were sharing a cabin tent - if I had faded before them I would have been seriously concerned about my stamina. My worries about such things though, were quickly superseded by feelings of vulnerability as I lay on top of my sleeping bag in just a pair of shorts, an open banquet to any mosquitoes who had managed to penetrate our bug nets. As Arnie Schwarzenegger used put it when challenging the baddies: "Come and get me!" PREVIOUS | NEXT | HOME | CONTENTS | ABOUT | SEND EMAIL