Two Corners of Australia
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Aerial view of Darwin
The most northern part of the state Northern Territories in Australia, called Top End, with its capital and largest city of Darwin, is situated very close to the famous Kakadu National Park known for its World heritage-listed landscapes, dramatic vistas, extraordinary wildlife and intro to the park’s Aboriginal peoples.
This area intrigued me since we visited Australia 20 years ago, when we were mainly in Sydney, Uluru in the center of the continent, the Daintree Rainforest on the northeastern coast and, of course, as avid scuba divers, the Great Barrier Reef. That left a whole lot of Australia to see, and this time we decided to get familiar with the Top End.
Small settlement with landing strip on our way to Kakadu National park
Funnily for me, Kakadu is a German word for cockatoo, but the National Park is named after an Indigenous word of a now extinct language, not the bird that I adore, something I only found out after arriving here.
Luckily for me, this country has a lot of parrots, and so at the beginning of our day trip into Kakadu National Park, I spotted a red-tail black cockatoo just outside the Aboriginal Warradjan Cultural Center, and all was right with the world again.
The National Park is huge, but with very little human presence as most of the park is a mix of wetlands and wooded rock formations – green, beautiful, with fantastic waterfalls (the wet season was just ending).
The Cessna could only hold eight people
Our choice of taking a small Cessna plane to explore the park from the air was a good one, just to comprehend the vastness of the landscape.
This area of Kakadu National Park is known as Stone Country
Tidal flats
Floodplains
In the main village of the park, Cooinda, we switched to a boat and cruised the Yellow Water Billabong and tributaries of the South Alligator River through the mangroves looking for birds and other wildlife.
The aboriginal word ‘billabong’ means a small, usually permanent, body of water formed by a river's meandering course.
Wildlife? That translates up here to: crocodiles! About 100,000 are assumed to live in these northern wetlands. They are still protected, as the crocodiles were nearly eradicated in Australia in the 70ies when there were only estimated 3000 left after decades of easy hunting from everyone who needed quick money.
Now the numbers are back, yet we had a tough time to see one, as they’re much easier to spot during the dry season when the waterways constrict to a few key areas and then they’re everywhere. During the wet season, they were everywhere else but close to human habitation.
I personally don’t care much about reptiles, so – no problem. I’m mainly looking for birds! By the way, the species were misidentified during the 1800s when the rivers were first named, and it took twenty plus years before a naturalist correctly recognized them as crocodiles, but good luck changing the maps. South Alligator River it remains.
We even saw wallabies
For the following day we had booked a birding tour and were picked up by two very nice, strong dialectal Aussies a bit older than us. We had a fantastic day! It started at the first location near a river with an unexpected group of about 20 sulfur-crested white cockatoos!
I was so elated - I could have gone home happy even if I didn’t spot another bird. The cockatoos, of course, were very noisy, as they always are, and I think I connected with two of them with some hand motion, and they followed us for a while, checking us out, and swooping close by. What an experience!
Another highlight that day were the colorful honeyeaters that showed us a great display of the elegant in-flight-catching-insects behavior. At the end of our tour we observed other hard-to see birds like the black-faced spoonbill and the black-necked stork at a location, which is this year only visible for about two weeks after the rainy season, catching fish pushed by river pressure over a flooded street, where they get trapped in grasslands and easily caught up by wading shoreline birds.
In a few days they expect at this small site thousands of birds like every year, as word travels.
Aborigines who lived in this specific area for centuries were dying for unknown reasons until it was discovered the ground contained uranium. The land was bought and a processing plant was built
Although the largest city in the Northern Territory, Darwin is a rather small city with more than a quarter of its inhabitants being aboriginals. Their history goes back 65,000 years and they had hundreds of indigenous tribes, each with their own language all over the Northern Territories, living off the harsh environment, hunting, fishing and foraging and being deeply connected to the land. The first Europeans came around 1862. A short time afterwards gold was discovered in the area and several thousand Chinese arrived to find their fortune. You had to be adventurous to come here (wetlands, mosquitos, crocodiles, …) and so after waves of Greeks, Vietnamese and Indonesians, sixty nationalities now make up a very multi-national Top End.
The day we arrived in Darwin it poured rain in buckets, with rolling thunder and lightning illuminating the clouds. We learned it was the last day of the final monsoon of the wet season, and sure enough, on the next day it cleared up and then it stayed as sunny as can be. Good thing our hotel had a pool - but! – what a pool!
In the vastness of the pool, where’s Randy?
Found him sneaking back into the room
It is easily the biggest pool I have ever seen, and one of the emptiest (size/numbers of people relationship). With a sandy entrance! Oh well, you cannot swim in the ocean in Darwin and the Northwest coast as depending on the season you have either toxic box-jellyfishes or crocs right at the shallow shoreline. Who knew?
Next, we flew from the north-west of Australia to the south-east. We have been to Sydney before, 20 years ago, and loved it, staying two weeks in that beautiful city and homeschooling our then 13-year old daughter Jillian and welcoming her friend Casey for three weeks from the US, joining us to explore the center and the east coast of Australia and the Great Barrier Reef. This time, we were only in Sydney for two nights, but we liked every minute of it. Sydney is easily a place one could live for a long time as this city just feels so very comfortable.
We stayed at a serviced apartment and luckily for us, only 12 flights of stairs up the hill from there we arrived at a very nice neighborhood called Potts Point, whose flair we immediately liked, with lots of small, but excellent, restaurants and beautiful buildings, that reminded me a bit of Bourbon street in New Orleans.
Three times thirty steps plus two times fifteen steps equals 120 steps - an enormous length of staircase, but what a view from Potts Point!
One of my favorite memories of Sydney from twenty years ago was visiting the Royal Botanical Garden, which is right next to the famous Opera house, because of the many colorful little parrots that landed on my arms and shoulders and the many sulfur-crested Cockatiels, not afraid of humans, picking new grass shoots right in front of you. Only those cockatiels remained, which was great, but the little parrots were gone, replaced by tons of black-faced Australian White Ibises.
Shopping in the beautifully restored Queen Victoria Building/mall in downtown Sydney
This time Sydney meant for us also: shopping time! We got an Apple universal outlet adapter set and from a huge water-sport shop, we bought dive-masks and snorkels and hard-soled water shoes for hard coral-rock beaches.
Now equipped with the essentials, we next head into the pulsating heart of our pacific peregrination…