In the tropics

Hi there, I'm in Darwin and have finally succeeded in getting online...I'm finding being back in a city very stressful - there's suddenly heaps to sort out and I'm hemorrhaging money, after having such a cheap trip here (lots of bush camping and free rest areas). Anyway, to recap...

There have been various dramas since leaving Broome...the journey was fabulous - but not without negatives, of course: such is life. For a start, the nice German boy that we were going to give a lift to dropped out - he got a job instead - so Laura and I turned to plan B, which was to take a couple we'd met, a Dutch guy and German girl. We knew it'd be a challenge to fit 4 people, plus luggage, into the car, but we told ourselves that we wanted to get going, we'd save money on petrol, etc etc. Hmm, tragically we could tell from the moment we committed to taking them that it was probably a bad idea. Let's just call it artistic differences...the 4 of us just didn't get on.

(This depicts the evil pair, from the back...the only photo we have of them!)

Additionally, cramming everybody's backpacks, the tents, sleeping bags, 15 litres of water, 10 litres of petrol, and food for 4 into the car every morning was extremely stressful! To make matters worse, the night before we left Broome I was plagued by sickness - some kind of 12 hour bug, which was really unpleasant. As usual, I was too rubbish to assert myself and say I was feeling ill until it was too late, and then because I hadn't told any of the others that I wasn't feeling well, I became weirdly embarrassed about it and felt like it was too late...we were out food shopping and I kept excusing myself on other pretexts to go and throw up, until eventually I realised that it really wasn't my fault I was sick and no one would find it weird!

Fortunately, that passed, but the first few days we were on the road I still wasn't feeling 100%, which didn't help with all the negative feelings that were floating around the car anyway...

Nonetheless, the 4 of us did see some fantastic things, including Geike Gorge and Wolfe Creek meteorite crater...famous, of course, for the film. Although it is pretty isolated and hard to get to, as depicted in the movie (130km down an unsurfaced road. I drove us the whole way myself - it was getting kind of fun by the end, jerking along over corrugations etc...probably not the best treatment for the poor car, but hey. At least it started again next morning...) we were somewhat disappointed to arrive to find a very well kept national park free camping ground, with pit toilets and everything, and probably about 10 other vehicles all sightseeing. This led, obviously, to many hilarious jokes about the movie ("When the car didn't start, why didn't they just go to the campsite and ask for a lift?" etc) and also to a sneaking suspicion that making the extremely bumpy drive might have been a mistake. However, a quick sunset scramble up the side of the crater soon put paid to that concern: it was a really amazing sight - a beautifully circular crater - the 2nd largest in the world - in the midst of a completely flat, featureless Australian landscape of scrub and sand.

(sorry for the out-of-focus photo and finger, but it's hard to do a meterorite crater justice!)
We rose at 5am to watch sunrise, then walked round the lip of the crater, which took an hour, then climbed down into the centre, which felt like a secret garden, eerily quiet as it was sheltered from the wind, with a tangled jungle of small trees and scrub. The ground was coated with white powder which a quick taste test identified as salt.

(please admire my hat, which I knitted myself).

Anyway, after that it was back on the road with not much more to see until we reached the first reasonable-sized town, Kunnunara, just before the state border. It was here that Laura and I decided it would be a good idea to part ways with our companions. It just wasn't working out - personality clashes don't mix well with the intense travelling experience, especially when it involves being cramped up in a car together for hours on end!! When I heard the guy discussing "drunken abos" with a racist Australian I knew it was never going to work. (Genuine quote from the Australian guy, who we had met at a campsite, when he was giving us his address: "You can tell your parents you've got some friends in Australia now - some white people".)

I was hoping that, since all bad feeling was quite obviously mutual, we would be able to acknowledge it and part amicably. So much for that - as I should have expected, I suppose, it wasn't that easy. I did come out of it feeling like a heartless bitch who'd just dumped two people in the middle of nowhere, but I assure you that my intentions were good! Anyway, we know that they succeeded in finding an alternative lift as, very irritatingly, we keep bumping into them in national parks along the way...makes for many awkward encounters when we least expect them!

Despite all the dramas, Kunnunara was a really lovely town - it has a tiny national park right next door as well as a "celebrity tree park". Yes, we were confused as to what that would be as well - trees that starred in the background in movies, say? It turned out to be trees planted by celebrities, including one planted by the most exciting Australian celebrity of all...Rolf Harris!


Having split with Steff and Yurie, then, we were lucky enough to pick up a new lift - a really nice Swedish guy called Stefan, a truly easy-going person who we got on with really well.
It was so lovely to escape the awful atmosphere that had been building up for the last few days!! We set off anew with sighs of relief, and the countryside continued to amaze. I think we averaged a national park a day for the entire 9 day journey! The scenery in this part of Australia involves a sandstone "escarpment" (like a raised tableland), covered in parts with monsoon forest and tropical woodland, broken down in places with breathtaking rocky gorges, rivers, pools and waterfalls. Having visited so many parks and read so many "How the land was formed" notices, I feel like I should be able to describe it more technically than that, but apparently not. Ah well. Suffice to say that scrambling down a sandstone gorge to swim in a perfectly circular pool in the rock, fed by an impressive cliff-high waterfall is a wonderful experience, which can bear alot of repetition (which is lucky, as the majority of national parks I've been to recently have been strikingly similar). It puts me in mind (pretentiousness warning) of Coleridge's Xanadu -

"And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were caverns ancient as the hills,
enfolding sunny spots of greenery."


As we travelled further north (we're now in the Northern Territory) warnings about crocodiles became more and more frequent, and at one point I wondered if we'd ever be able to swim again - saltwater crocodiles, which are common here, are big (can grow up to 7 metres) and aggressive - they like to stalk and eat large mammals, including humans. They can remain underwater for long stretches, observing their prey, and launch themselves out of the water. Although they're called salties, they also live in freshwater rivers and creeks, and alot of places have "No swimming - crocodiles" signs up. Nonetheless, we have been swimming frequently - though only in pools which are regularly monitored for their presence - although with a certain amount of hysteria and nervous giggling. If only it wasn't so hot here - but when you've driven a few hundred kilometres in the heat of the day, and haven't showered in 4 days, the threat of crocodiles pales in comparison with the need to jump in some nice cool water. We've only seen one croc in the wild so far - it was quite far away, in the middle of a river - but I think I'll probably try to get to a farm at some point to see some up close (and I'm definitely going to try some crocodile meat at some point! Tastes like chicken they say...) We've also seen two snakes, although both times they were in the process of being chased and captured by a park keeper, which kind of took the edge off the drama somewhat.

Darwin seems like a really lovely city, and I'm only sad that we've had so little time here - we think we need to keep moving in order to give ourselves sufficient time to sell the car over in Cairns. Since arriving we've been trying to balance doing fun sightseeing with boring organisational stuff, and we also managed to find ourselves one day's work in a laundry - 7 hours of feeding sheets through a pressing machine = not fun AT ALL: I rank it better than telesales but worse than fruit picking, but at least the pay was ok. I've just got back from the museum now, which was very cool and interesting.

We had to part ways with Stefan here, so we'll be moving on tomorrow with a (hopefully) nice German girl called Cathrin. I'm a bit nervous of travelling with someone new after realising how bad it can be when it goes wrong, but fingers crossed this will work out ok!!