Tues 14th – Yeah no whiz bangs, much quieter night but the whole campsite was woken by a large flock of cockatoos making their screeching noise as they perched in the tress close by. No big walks or rock climbing today, knees are sore and the butt is very sore where I fell onto it.
The Kakadu Hwy is bitumen all the way up to Jabiru, 110km all the way. The vegetation is quite diverse, constantly changing, mixed with ant hills of various sizes.
We called into the Bowali visitor centre. It’s really well set up, quite an impressive display of different aspects and information of Kakadu. There are also toilets, a kiosk and souvenir shop.
We did a quick stop at Jabiru, posting some postcards, did a quick walk around. Reasonable size supermarket, bank, newsagents, takeaway food, travel agent not much else.
So that pretty well does Kakadu for us, a quick trip. So are we in the Kaka-do camp or the Kaka-don’t camp. We are in the Kaka-do camp, especially if you haven’t done it before. A lot of the area is just like driving through any other national park or scrub but the wetlands and waterfalls are impressive and make the trip worth while. For a place that gets a lot of rain and flooding during the wet season we found it surprising dry, yes even though it’s the dry season, we still thought the ground would be a bit damper. We have found we have been covered in more dust and got dirtier here than in any where else this trip so far.
Wow that was an interesting sight. We were heading back out to the hwy, just outside the national park and there was grass fire right up to the road. There were heaps of birds, kites, crows, eagles all waiting on the road for any animals scurrying out of the fire, incredible.
We drove down to Katherine, got some info from the info centre and went straight to Katherine Springs. Supposed to be 32 degrees but it felt cooler. Lots of people, natural and man made combination. A bit of a current takes you down stream to a deeper area where kids were dive bombing. Up further the older generation gathered. We chatted for ages to some other travellers.
We setup camp at Springvale Homestead, popular spot. $20 unpowered for the two of us $27 if we wanted power. Very laid back, no defined sites, lovely setting, old amenities.
