Darwin to Marl Campground (Kakadu National Park), Northern Territory
A fantastic day: I get my camera back, we have a great tour at the Exotic Fruit Farm south of Darwin, then we're bowled over by the amazing Ubirr rock art galleries in Kakadu National Park. A truly wonderful day.
We stopped by the post office early to find my camera had indeed arrived! Yay! I can now take pictures again.
Our first stop was the Exotic Fruit Farm, about an hour's drive south of Darwin, where we'd signed up for a morning tour. Helen West, who's lived in the Territory for 50 years and has been running the farm for 20, gave it. It was just wonderful.
First, we sampled all the various fruit that was ripe... Helen and her assistants had cut up various fruits and put them in sample containers on a table, odd fruits like pitaya and jackfruit and sapodilla and aibu. Chris really liked the sapodilla; I enjoyed the jackfruit, and especially the savory roasted jackfruit seeds that Helen had made.
Then it was off to the orchard, where we saw many bizarre fruits. I liked the pitaya, or dragon fruit: it's actually the fruit of a cactus! We also saw durian trees for the first time. Helen has had a bit of a problem growing many of these fruits, and learning how to get them to produce more. Sometimes the cockatoos eat all the fruit, other times fruit just doesn't set, and sometimes there's too much rain or not enough. All in all, there's a good fifty, maybe sixty different kinds of fruit there!
We even left with a present: a fruit off a miracle plant. The idea is you chew the flesh of this fruit, then you get the miracle: sour things taste sweet! As we were driving over to Kakadu, we tried it. The miracle fruit is small, about the size of a jelly bean, and mostly seed; the flesh isn't more than a millimeter thick. It doesn't taste like anything, either. But put a piece of lemon in your mouth, and it isn't sour anymore--it's changed into an odd, saccharine sweetness that's just too cloying. We couldn't eat anything for a couple of hours after that, until the effect wore off.
Into Kakadu, and the Fuss
The drive over to Kakadu was slow and uneventful, the roads are congested with all sorts of people in campervans and towing caravans and just generally being, well, tourists, like ourselves. We drove over to the visitor center, walked through it, then drove out to the Ubirr area and got a campsite at Marl campground... surprisingly, the campground was only about 2/3rds full. Then about 4:00 we drove over to the Ubirr rock art site, a huge overhang richly decorated with Aboriginal rock art.
And that's when I found out what the fuss was all about. It was magnificent, a solid band of art some twenty meters long stretching along a smooth band of sandstone under an overhang. There were large pictures in the X-Ray style of barramundi. There were some of white men. There were others of extinct animals. It was just stunning, and even with a crowd of people around it was spellbinding.
We hung around about ten minutes for a scheduled ranger talk, and listened to the ranger explain all the different aspects of the painting--what they painted, why they painted, how they painted. She passed around binoculars so you could get a closer look at the paintings as well. It was a very good talk.
After looking at the rock art, we climbed up to the lookout and watched the sun set over the billabong. It was wonderful as well, and the ranger walked up and gave a chat on how the local Aborigines lived, as well as how the park came to be.
Ahhhh... a truly nice day, full of interesting experiences. It was absolutely great.
Weird Wildlife Sighting
Hm. Black cockatoos, the type with the orange spots under their tails?