The locals in Darwin have a nickname for Kakadu National Park….Kakadon’t, as in don’t bother going. As they get in for free while tourists have to pay $25, plus camping fees, yet the locals still think it’s not worth going I was in two minds about going there, now I’m tending to think they are right. The tourist brochures go on about all the wildlife but the reality is that it is a big park, and the wildlife is spread out all over it for most of the year, it is only late in the dry season when most of the waterholes have shrunk or dried up, forcing the wildlife to concentrate in a smaller area, that you can easily see all these birds and animals.
The other main attraction is the rock art, but to be frank I’ve seen better and bigger. I guess it is an attraction to foreign tourists though ? You can spend a lot of time just driving from one place to another and see nothing but scrub at the side of the road. Then you get distracted by a sign to a lookout, climb up a hill for 45 minutes just to lookout over more trees.
OK, time to get off the soapbox, LOL
After my trip on the crocodile cruise it was late when I got into the park, so I headed for the first campsite along the road. According to the map it was supposed to be a 2WD access road but halfway in I came to a wide stretch of water across the road, water too murky to see the bottom. Normally you would walk it to check the depth, but with all the crocodile warning signs there was no way I would do that ! So I slowly crept across …axle deep, then sill deep, then the front wheels dipped more …whoops, reverse out and try another line. No worries this time, barely axle deep, and on to the campsite. The actual camp area was right next to a creek, but no way was I going to sleep there, after seeing the crocs that afternoon, so I drove back about 3 hundred metres to set up my swag, hoping that was far enough from the water !
At the next night’s camp there were lots of other people around, so I set up camp in the middle, figuring that was safer. Yes, I do have a bit of a phobia about crocodiles! They are a perfect killing machine, evolved over countless years, and are at the top of the food chain, even above us humans.
Apart from visiting a couple of the art sites I spent most of my time trying to do some bird photography, with mixed results :