Kakadu

Before returning to Alice Springs on November 11, we stopped to collect fossils. In a short time I was bitten by many mosquitos and later resumed a course of antihistamines, which I continue to take now -- 11 days later. The mosquitos don't end, and repellant has helped, though I left my aerogard on the bus in Darwin.

I was lucky to find this fossil. The glarey bits in the center are two seashells, stuck in a rock in the middle of Australia. The backdrop here is a hostel bunkbed, because I spare no expense for this kind of high class photography.


Before going to Kakadu forest, the bus driver stopped at Batchelor for the jumping crocodile cruise. These crocodiles can fling three meters of themselves into the air so as to chomp on a piece of meat. Supposedly, all crocodiles can jump, but we see them jump so rarely because the meat isn't flying through the air at them and bobbing along the water, like the raw meat which the feeders feed them does.


Kakadu boasts a series of plunge pools and waterfalls. Although by November the forest is officially into the "wet" season (the Top End has two seasons, wet and dry), many of the waterfalls were dry or barely trickling. The water, though, is quite refreshing, especially when the weather gets as hot as 35 degrees celsius. The pools are easy to swim in. It's easy to forget that you're a boiling potato, your skin getting brown and crispy. Before the first plunge pool, I met three guys sitting beside their 4WD and who had found four abandoned baby feral pigs. I didn't want to think that their rescue might have been motivated by hunger. Always keen on meeting the wildlife, I visited with this baby pig, who followed my every step. I'd walk a step, and it'd gruntily hobble forward. I'd walk another step, and it'd walk forward, its snout at my heel. We walked to the stream together, and I braved stepping on a crocodile to refresh myself with water; the pig drank. And it wouldn't leave my foot.


At this point there's a kind of gap in my picture-taking. I visited two plunge pools (Maguk and Jim Jim) and swam with our budget-style tour group. On the tour, the drivers take us on walks and pools and waterfalls and drive us to our campsites. When we returned to our campsite after visiting Jim Jim Falls, an Irish guy from our group couldn't leave the bus. His hands had started to go numb, and his legs started to cramp. Two big blokes carried him off of the bus, and we set up a place for him to lie down and put his feet up. He experienced a type of paralysis in his hands. I put a tablet into a water bottle, which had electrolytes and which would replace his sugars, and he wouldn't drink it. I gave it to his girlfriend to give him to drink, and he still wouldn't. He was in shock and very dehydrated. Because he was screaming out with pain, the guide radioed for help. He asked the injured fellow a number of questions, and Carl said that he might've been bitten. Worried he might have a snakebite, the two guides drove him to another vehicle where he was then taken to a helicopter and flown back to Darwin City.

Abandoned by our guides, our group sat around the campsite and had lunch. An hour passed and we found ourselves in the heat of the afternoon, a thick oppressive heat even in the shade. Several women from Barcelona went to the toilet facility to wash the dishes, and they never returned. A few of us later found them in the toilet area; they were sitting on benches, and we noticed it was indeed cooler there than at camp. We brought our camping mattresses into the toilet and sat around the ladies side of the facility, even the men, playing a card game called Asshole with the gals from Barcelona. When we passed our turns, we said "paso," and when someone at the end of the round was the asshole, we called him the "culo." Asshole in Barcelona consists of an entire hierarchy of castes, including assholes, sub-assholes, the middle citizenry, queens, and sub-queens. We passed the time this way and occasionally skipped a round to shower off the heat in the stalls with the running water, cane toads, and giant crickets.

Here is what our campsite at Muirella Park looked like.


That night we camped near Gunlom Falls and walked out there for star-gazing. It's easy to see shooting stars, and I can find some of the Northern Hemisphere constellations, though they're backwards and upside-down, but I have trouble pointing out other constellations. Usually I first spot Orion, then Taurus, then the Pleiades. Also, the moon waxes and wanes untraditionally. I'm used to the cheshire cat moon (the smile) being a waning moon. Here it's a waxing moon. One of my professors told me many years ago at university that "Cum crescet decrescet, et cum decrescet crescet." With a crescent or a "C" moon, the moon decrescendos (wanes). And with a decrescent or a "D" moon, the moon crescendos (waxes). It's one of those cool Latin ironies. Here the crescents wax; it's odd.

Anyway, our tour guides were emotionally exhausted from Carl's possible snakebite emergency. (There were no puncture wounds, and it turned out to be dehydration, not helped by the night before's heavy drinking, poor bloke.) So, they left us to our devices, and we donned our bathers and climbed up the cliffs. Well, two of us did, I and my new friend Judith from Barcelona. The guides lay prone in the grass and didn't bother to tell the rest of the group. We had to wave at them from the top of the falls.



It was beautiful up there, a series of cascading pools.






I ended up climbing up even further and swam down a ravine to another waterfall (the third waterfall of Gunlom, if you're counting). Several Irish blokes from the group did the same. Later they sat atop the second waterfall and jokingly blocked the falls by sitting in a small enclosure and stopping the water.