Signs of the times

When I was researching the trip - in particular the 4WD routes that I would drive - I was surprised how often the photos were of road signs. Here were people describing routes through magnificient landscape, and the photos that they showed were of ugly placards. My understanding of this grew on my first day out of Darwin, so here's my own story of that first day, mostly in images produced by humans ...

Early on the morning after the conference ended I flew from Perth up to Darwin, to collect a hire campervan and visit Kakadu National Park. It lies about 150 km to the east of Darwin, with its northern boundary formed by the van Diemen Gulf, and, like Darwin - at 12 degrees south of the equator -, lies squarely within the tropics. The park is huge: it stretches 130 km west-east, and has an area of nearly 20,000 square kilometers (do the maths). It's famed for its wetlands.

Following Oz's recommendation I had bought myself a 3G pre-paid mobile phone, which, as the uninspiring tagline "Works better in more places" suggests, has better - but far from complete - coverage. When I had a signal, I could get a free weather forecast. My time in Perth had coincided with the first warm spell of spring, with temperatures in the 25-30 degree C range. The weather broke the day I left, and it was spitting rain as I travelled to the airport, heading for Darwin's forecast 35 and sunshine. The only way that the forecast changed in my time there was that the sunshine changed to showers. The forecast temperatures were accurate, although happily the showers missed me.

First stop after collecting the campervan was the supermarket to buy 5 days supplies. I zig-zagged up and down the aisles and found myself in the animal food section. Neither the label nor the illustration on this bird seed were unexpected, but the combination wasn't one that you'd expect in Europe ...

Even before I got out of Darwin, I was reminded of one of the downsides of the humid tropics. In the event, the mosquitos were much rarer than expected. I wasn't disappointed.

The Stuart Highway is the road that crosses the continent from Darwin in the north to Adelaide in the south, and the first part of my route to Kakadu followed it. I'd already travelled a little way as it's almost exactly 1500 km from Darwin to Alice.

A reminder not to start fires, but as it turned out, one with another conservation message. Cane toads, introduced to Queensland in the first half of the last century to control a beetle pest of sugar cane, have turned out to be a major problem. Their population has exploded, and their poisonous skin is death to any predator that takes them. Cane toads reached Kakadu in 2004. I didn't see a single frilled lizard or goanna (monitor lizard) while I was there.

To break my journey, I stopped at Fogg Dam, a small wetland that scarcely gets a mention in the guide books. I didn't see any terrapins ...

... or crocodiles ...

... but I did see plenty of waterbirds from the safety of my car on the causeway. This was a mini-version of what I expected Kakadu to be like: surround-sound and -sight wildlife. So when I set out again for Kakadu, I wasn't expecting this:

It went on for kilometer after kilomter. For those of you who don't speak satnav, the symbol at the bottom left means that the next thing the nice lady in my satnav will say will be "You have reached your destination" - in 138 km time. Not much conversation there, then. (I still haven't got around to resetting the clock.)

Nothing changed at the park entrance - just a marker sign:

Where were the wetlands for which the park was famed? There was a reminder every few kilometers that things could get pretty wet, but no sign of water at this time of year ...

... and certainly not 1.4 meters!

In about 100 km of driving through the park, the vista opened out once for a couple of kilometers either side of the South Alligator River. But the floodplain was as dry as dry could be:



I reached the park visitor centre half an hour before closing time, enquired about individual guides, and got a cursory response that there weren't any, and a copy of the visitor booklet. I had expected to have stopped earlier for the night, but in desperation I phoned ahead to book a place on the 6.45 morning boat trip on Yellow Water - at least I'd see some of the stuff. I booked into the campsite there, as well, and set out another 50 km through woodland.

Despite the van having fly screens on the windows - an unadvertised luxury that meant I could open all the windows - and an electric fan that the woman at the van hire place had let me have free when I declined to pay to hire one (potential mistake, that), I lay in a pool of sweat in the campervan. There is another largish national park - Litchfield - near Darwin, and the locals say "Kakadu don't, Litchfield do". I began to wonder whether they were right. It wouldn't be a disaster, because I would simply head there, or to the Katherine Gorge, but for the first time in the trip, Australia was disappointing.