Day 38 - Ubirr - Kakadu

This morning we got away just after 7am and headed for Kakadu.  The road into Kakadu from Darwin doesn't have a lot of sightseeing opportunities when you have a 24ft van in tow, so we pretty much make a "b"line for the visitor's centre.  The visitors centre is great.  Fantastic interactive displays for the kids and movies showing different aspect of the park.  As Kakadu is so big, we decide that it is not very economical to use Jabiru as a base, as it is too far from everything, so we decide to make lots of one night stop overs throughout, which we don't normally like to do, but in this case we think it is the best option.

First stop Ubirr which is 40km east of Jabiru and right on the border of Kakadu and Arnhemland.  We arrive at the campsite to find an aboriginal painting activity begins in 30 min, great timing.  So the kids are straight into that, a couple of aboriginals from Arnhemland and a ranger conducting the session.  And wouldn't you know it, our travelling buddies are here also.  We thought by now they were a couple of days ahead of us, however, they found there was a lot more to see here than expected and decided to stay on a little longer.  Robbo, you wouldn't believe it, we are in the middle of nowhere and we met another couple from Perth  who had bought Tracey and Woob's camper trailer off them, what a small world!!!

So the girls really enjoyed the painting and did a wonderful job.  The aboriginal guys showed them how to make brushes from reeds.  I couldn't believe what a steady hand they had to paint all those lines that they do.  Cody wasn't very interested.  All him and his little buddy Alex wanted to do was go back to the van and play checkers!!!

At 3pm we went on a boat trip up East Alligator River.  The river creates the border between Kakadu and Guluyambi ( Arnhemland).  Our tour guide was a very humorous aboriginal guy who had a very thick accent as english is very much a second language for them out here.  Anyway, we saw heaps of salties, and we docked on the edge of Arnhemland for a bit, and he gave us a run down on the spears and some other aboriginal tools.  He also gave us a demo on throwing the spears using a woomera (sp?)  Very interesting.

Today was really hot.  The car "outside temp" said 39 when we hopped back in at 5pm, now I know that it isn't always really accurate but it still has to be pretty hot to reach that.

In the evening we went to suss out the sunset from the lookout as we had heard so much about it.  We quickly walked past the amazing rock art that we put on the list for tomorrow.  I think every tourist and his camera were at the lookout, but it was pretty special.  Grassy plains and billabongs and flocks of birds as far as the eye could see and the rock formations that encircles the entire area, just beautiful!!

We try to keep the generator running as long as we can tonight to keep the van cool.  Lots of mozzies and march flies are a real problem here.  We have every possible window open to go to sleep but there is not a breath of wind, not  a frog croaking, not a cricket creeking....nothing......Glen thinks this is the quietest place we have been.  Glen gets up in the middle of the night with a torch and sees tiny green eyes looking at him from everywhere......spiders.....thankfully, I didn't see any in my travels.  Have seen a few dead cane toads but Tori is the only one so far, who has encountered a live one, at Litchfield.  The temp drops to a bearable temp at about 3am!!!