9th May - 19th May 2000

How do they stay still?

The final leg of our Australian journey was to take us from Alice to Darwin, and we travelled with Northern Territory Adventure Tours. This was a bit of a misnomer, as there was nothing adventurous about the trip whatsoever. Indeed, the nature of the tour and the uselessness of the guide made me wish we had simply decided to hop on a Greyhound bus and go straight to Darwin. We paid well over the odds for the trip, based on the assumption that we would have a small group on a small bus with informative guides. Instead we were on a full-sized bus (coach they insist on calling them here) with 38 passengers and a guide who failed to tell us anything that wasn't in Lonely Planet, and who even then managed to get some of his information wrong. When I told our cook that I was annoyed tat we were on a large bus, despite having been told that we would be in a small group, she simply lied to me and said that they never ran small buses on the Alice-Darwin route; I subsequently discovered that this was not true, as the bus (unscheduled, unadvertised) which ran the next day was a midi-bus with only five passengers. About the only good thing I could say about NTAT was that the food was for the most part excellent.

The highlight of the first day was the Devil's Marbles, something that Veronika in particular had been greatly looking forward to visiting. When we arrived, we were informed that we had only fifteen minutes to check it out - this after a six-hour drive to get there - not very impressive. The formations were excellent - huge, almost spherical rocks, stacked on top of each other. They had originally been single rocks formed by volcanic activity, but erosion over many thousands of years combined with water forcing open cracks created the weird spheres, some up to five metres in diameter. The local aboriginals believed that they were the eggs of the Rainbow Serpent.

From the Devil's Marbles we travelled on to Tennant Creek for lunch before driving on to Daly Waters, where we camped outside a pub, allegedly, but in fact not, the pub featured in the Crocodile Dundee films. Again, an interesting interpretation of "bush camping" as advertised by NTAT. At least the temperature was rising, as we had been cold in Alice and Uluru.

Next morning we had another early start before heading on to Mataranka. the attraction here is a natural thermal pool in a beautiful rainforest setting. Despite the presence of numerous white-tails (typically nasty Australian spiders whose bite, while not fatal, is likely to leave you with persistent health problems for many years, and can cause amongst other things total liver failure) webbed up in the trees, we went for a refreshing swim in the small pool. After our swim, we headed on to Katherine, the second-largest town in the Northern Territory which had recently been flooded - the river level rose by 18 metres (60 feet). Fortunately the water had receded, but the debris around the bases of the trees in the forests showed clearly that the floods had been there. From Katherine we made our way to Nitmiluk National Park, also known as Katherine Gorge, actually a series of 13 gorges carved out by the river Katherine. We had been led to believe that this was stunningly beautiful, but I would have to say that it was only ok. We opted not to pay to go canoeing, instead choosing a hike up to a swimhole overlooking one of the gorges. The walk was nothing special but not overly strenuous, and the swimhole was not spectacular, but it was a welcome relief from the tropical heat. We hung around the pool for a while before heading back.

Fergus at Edith Falls

That night was spent half way from the town to the national park, and we amused ourselves with beer and silly games while our guide and cook disappeared to watch a rugby game on TV. The next day was another long drive, with the only stop worth mentioning being the beautiful Edith Falls, for yet another swim in a water hole, unsurprisingly given the name at the foot of some pretty but not spectacular waterfalls. We swam around here for a while and then headed off. We then drove into Pine Creek for lunch, and the entertainment was provided by our idiot driver-guide getting the bus bogged down in a field before eventually finding a helpful lorry driver to tow the bus out of the mud. We had lunch in a small park in the town, but the highlight of the stop was the amazing termite mounds dotted all over the park - some of them were four or five metres tall. In the centre of Australia, the termites build their mounds underground to avoid the heat, while further north they build them above ground to protect themselves against the periodic flooding. The other interesting things about the mounds is that they are aligned north-south to present as small an area as possible to the sun. All the way from the centre north, the mounds grow in height as the soil becomes increasingly argillaceous (clay-bearing) and therefore better-suited to construction. Apparently in some areas (notably Kakadu and Litchfield) they get even bigger.

Making a mountain out of an anthill ...

After that, it was a boring drive to Darwin where we were dropped off at Elke's. our hostel. This was a poor choice on our part - the staff were unfriendly to the point of rudeness, the showers were insufficient to meet the demands of the number of people staying there (three showers for about 150 people!), the kitchens were equally inadequate and we were not allowed to stay for longer than three days, supposedly due to lack of space but in fact because we didn't book any tours through their travel centre. We were not the only ones to be unimpressed with the hostel, and on Sunday we moved to the much better (and infinitely friendlier) YHA hostel, along with several other people. Elke's advertises itself as an Northern Territory award-winner for best hostel, but what they fail to mention in their adverts is that the aware was won in 1996. The newly rebuilt YHA has excellent facilities, a beautiful swimming pool, friendly helpful staff and a cheap travel centre, where we arranged travel insurance for our trip through Asia and bought flights from Jakarta to Kuala Lumpur. Fortunately, Amidas sent me some work which basically covered the cost of the insurance and flights, so our budget didn't suffer too badly.

Darwin itself is a modern town, having been largely destroyed during the second world war and during Cyclone Tracy in 1974. Like many things in Australia, it's often described as beautiful, but its architectural charm, like many modern places, eludes me, so much so that I have thus far failed to take a single photograph.

One pleasant aspect of our stay in Darwin was that we met a number of people we'd travelled with elsewhere in Australia. We went for a few beers in an Irish pub with Mark, who we'd travelled with from Port Campbell to Adelaide and from Adelaide to Alice Springs, and it turned out that he is even catching the same flight as us from Darwin to Denpasar on Bali. The underlying lattice of coincidence rears its infamous head once more...

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