Day 36: Kakadu National Park

Last night was the first time we have had a warm night sleeping in our caravan. Naturally I loved it, naturally Darren didn't. The overnight temperature was about 21 degrees with today getting to a glorious 33 degrees. Beautiful weather for a summer vacation, not so good for walking, so I was up at 6am putting washing on so we were ready to leave by 7am.

Our activities for today were concentrated in the East Alligator River region with a ranger guided walk through Bardedjilidji starting our day off.

We weren't fortunate enough to see any crocodiles on this walk but we were educated by the ranger on all the flora and heritage of the region. We were fortunate to see some of the clearest and brightest Aboriginal art work we have seen to date. Unfortunately though, nobody has yet been able to decipher it's meaning.

Whilst we didn't see any live crocs on this walk, the ranger showed us the skull from a 4 metre croc that is estimated to have belonged to either a mature female or a juvenile male.

By 10am we had reached the conclusion of the Bardedjilidji walk so we headed to Border store in the hope of booking the Guluyambi Cultural cruise. A few of the locals we had spoken to had recommended it and it was within our budget so we thought this would be the one for us.

We were able to get on the 1pm cruise so by the time it was all sorted we had about 2 1/2 hours spare before needing to be at the boat ramp.

Much to the kids dismay, we decided to do the Manngarre Rainforest Walk because it was only 1.2 km and was in the East Alligator River region.

The start of the walk is near the Downstream Boat Ramp, so before starting the walk we made a quick detour to see if their were any crocodiles in the river. There was a man fishing when we went to look, with his wife sitting in a chair in the shade. We got talking to them and they had mentioned there were no crocs around this morning but yesterday there was heaps. Darn it, we were starting to wonder if we were ever going to see any crocodiles!

After our little conversation, we continued on to our walk. Soon after commencement we could hear something making a huge raucous. We only continued a little further when the source of the noise became apparent. It was a whole heap of flying foxes. There were so many of them and they were so loud. We stood in awe for a little while before Brandon begged us to continue.

Our disappointment at not seeing a crocodile yet was soon abated when Darren noticed one down at the waters edge during our walk. By the end of it we had seen about 4, both in and out of the water.

The Manngarre rainforest walk took us to a section where women only were permitted, so Micaela and I got to do a small portion of the walk on our own. The Aboriginal culture is very big in distinguishing between what males and females are permitted to do. This particular section contained a site that was of particular cultural importance to women, thus the reason men are not allowed.

Once we finished the walk we returned to Border store for lunch before proceeding to Upstream Boat Ramp in preparation to board for the Guluyambi Cultural cruise.

The cruise was hosted by 3 indigenous men. One only did the driving as his English wasn't too good. The other two, whilst not as charismatic as our guide in Katherine gorge, were extremely informative none the less.

The cruise enabled us to see even more crocodiles whilst being educated in Indigenous ways. We were also permitted to enter Arnhem land and treated to a spear throwing demonstration. Ethan and Brandon were starting to get a bit restless due to both fatigue and irritability from the heat, but their attention was quickly regained during the spear throwing.

Aboriginal law states that women are not permitted to touch the woomera, but they made an exception for us.

The cruise finished at about 3pm so we returned to Jabiru and attempted to get some supplies from the supermarket only to find it closes at 3pm on a Saturday. Whoops, we were 30 minutes too late. Oh well, back to the park for a nice cool swim we went and where we stayed to enjoy dinner by the pool. Got to love holidays!

Tomorrow we are planning another early one, as it is unbearably too hot for walking by 12pm. There is still so much we would like to see and do. No way we are going to have time to do it all so I guess we will just have to return one day :-).