Wednesday 16th February
We spent a couple of days meandering around Darwin, a town who's inhabitants are so laid back that they are practically comotose, I guess that they need to be though in order to overlook all of the very nasty things that could put an end to their lives at any moment.
Originally we had planned to buy a campervan and then try to sell it when we reached Sydney, however as it was out of season there were slim pickings and the ones that were advertised were either very quickly snapped up or seriously beaten up.
So instead we decided to rent one for 3 months which works out at about the same cost as buying one but you got the added bonus of having a giant logo emblazzoned on the side of the vehicle.
We had booked it through a travel agent but when we went to pick it up apparently there had been a mojor cock up and the price we had been given was actually only for 78 days and not the 90 requested.
After some heavy negotiations which saw Pauline and I standing about gormlessly whislt the man at the hire company tried his best to patronise anyone he could reach on his phone, we finally managed to get it for the original price.
We spent the first night at a caravan park that had undergone some pretty heavy flooding, when we checked in the lady at reception gave us a map of all of the places we couldnt park and in my usual style I nodded and agreed before heading off in a completely different direction.
Needless to say I ended up parking in the middle of a marsh, we got well and truly stuck resulting in having to be towed out the following morning by a man who didnt look best pleased to be doing manual labour, in the heavy rain, at that time of the day.
To pass the time we have taken to naming all of the kangaroos we see on our journey, so far we have Brian, Stacy, Skippy, Iggy Pop, Colin and Mr Johnson, to be honest though I think Tyler was trying to be funny with his naming towards the end, what kind of a name is Colin for a Kangaroo anyway.
Having paid the $25 per person entrance fee to Kakadu national park we promptly discovered that the only thing that remained open was the road and even that was sketchy in places.
Apparently its wet season you see, however when an Australian says wet what they actually mean is underwater, we attempted to book onto one of the wet season river cruises but even they arent running as you can no longer get to the boat dock due to floods.
So instead we pitched ourselves up at another park in Jaribu to see how things panned out overnight, Jabiru itself had a couple of things going for it, namely an Airport and a Highway that could get you out of there quickly.
This time I listened intently to exactly where the receptionist told us to park and for a moment I thought that I had actually succeeded in locating it, that is right up until the point where I opened the door to inspect my parking and my feet disappeared under a meter of extremely soggy mud.
Whilst I managed to retrieve my mud encrusted flip flops (known as thongs here for some odd reason), I am amazed that the entire van wasnt sucked into the earths core that night as no sooner had we parked than the heavens opened and shat all over us for the remainder of the day.
We had a small puddle on the road between our van and the toilet block but by the time any of us actually needed a leak it was a raging torrent which I am certain would have deposited us at the boat dock we needed if we were to have fallen in.
To make matters a little worse we have just discovered that there is a Cyclone warning in Darwin and its no longer a matter of if it will hit but when, literally every few minutes there is a scary announcement on the radio to ensure your house is Cyclone proof or to get the hell out of it.
So as a result of all of this we have decided to cut our park trip a little short and head on down to Katherine and on to the Kimberlies which are apparently lovely at this time of the year if you can actually get there through the crocodile infested flood waters.
On the way out of the park we passed a mother and her two children fishing off of a small bridge in one of the creeks, when we reached the other side there was a crocodile just sitting at the side of the road watching them intently.
It is incredible how totally blais
é everyone is about them up here, I am sure that if they could get away with it they would open some kind of petting zoo.
No comments:
Post a Comment