Dave & Dana in Australia

Hello again all.  It’s been a while since our last post but, until we had a visitor and spent some time travelling, we hadn’t really been up to much apart from being busy with work. On March 24, however, my Mom arrived in Sydney for a 4 week visit.  She spent most of the first week touring around the city or visiting the beach here in Manly.  I had a day off that week which allowed me to take us on a drive around the Eastern suburbs, Bondi beach and Watson’s Bay.  That Saturday we had Dana’s mother in town while she was in transit from New Zealand back to Canada.  We picked her up at the airport and drove out to the Blue mountains and had a nice day driving around and taking in the scenery. 

Shortly thereafter we departed for our tour of the Red Center and Top End.  We flew to Alice Springs, population 25k, smack in the middle of Australia and whose claim to fame was that it was on the telegraph route and is only a 5 hour drive to Uluru, formerly known as Ayers Rock.  We picked up a VW Kombi van there and zoomed out to Uluru to catch the sunset.  Really tough to describe what Uluru is like - it is just a really big rock (REALLY big), but in person it’s a bit more surreal and monumental than that.  The next day we visited another big rock formation, this one called Kata Tjuta, or the Olgas.  We had a nice 2.5 hour walk around them before heading back to Uluru where…we climbed that sucker like paper!  Dana and I (and I can’t believe Dana did this since she usually has a problem with heights, I don’t, and it was so high that I was freaking out) spent what seemed like a half hour climbing up to the 340 metre summit.  There’s a chain you use to hold on while climbing the first 250 metres or so, and believe me you need it!

The next day we left early and drove a couple of hours to Kings Canyon, where we did a little one hour loop walk.  After that it gets a bit blurry - we covered about 2500 km over the remainder of that day and the next driving up the Stuart highway all the way to Katherine.  At least you can drive fast as most roads in the Northern Territory don’t have speed limits.  There really isn’t much on the highway - a few cattle stations, and some road houses that offer the standard pub, shop, gas, shoddy hotel and camping facilities, and god help you if you end up off the highway.  In fact, it is so empty that you’re obligated to help if you come across someone in trouble, which we did one evening by towing an aboriginal family in their malfunctioning and and ancient car to the nearest station.  A few interesting things though, like the Devil’s Marbles (more rocks, but they’re cool) Daly Waters is kind of neat too - there was a hot rod festival going on when we got there (keep in mind this place has a population of about 10, so everyone came a long way from a lot of small places to party it up all weekend in Daly Waters).  At last though we were in the top end, where there was plenty to do within reasonble distances again.   

The first place to visit was Katherine Gorge, where we took in the views over the river and floodplain on a short hike.  Most places in Australia, much like the commonly held perceptions, are a bit parched.  Not so much in the Top End.  During the wet season, which thankfully had ended a little before we got there, the river was 20 M above normal, which fills the entire valley.  In fact, tons of the Top End is under water for a few months each year.  If we had arrived in the area say, a week beforehand, we wouldn’t have been visiting most places, or indeed making it to where we had booked our campsites.  During our 3 days we visited both Kakadu and Litchfield National Parks.  Just fantastically pristine wilderness in Kakadu.  We took an early morning boat tour on the South Crocodile river, which seemed about 20 km wide since it was still massively flooded, and we must have seen 50 different species of birds.  Also, salt water crocodiles, which you should not mess with.  Definitely a place to go back to a bit further into the dry season and with a 4wd, since that’s the only way to see most places.  Litchfield on the other hand has things like massive termite mounds (Australia has a termite problem says I) and a bunch of waterfall-fed lagoons that you can swim in (no salties) - very refreshing when it’s rarely less than 30 degrees.

From there we flew across the Top End to Cairns in Northern Queensland.  We picked up a rental car and headed an hour north to a small resort town called Port Douglas.  We had a little apartment from which we based our next three days, spending one day on the Great Barrier Reef snorkeling, one day on the Daintree River and Mossman Gorge, and the final day driving up to the Cape Tribulation rainforest and beaches, right up to where the paved road ends and there’s nothing north but a couple hundred kms of dirt track, a hundred km of Ocean and Papua New Guinea.