Day 3: The kimberly

After Litchfield National Park we drove a few more hours to Katherine, and then set up camp just outside Katherine Gorge National Park. This park is also known as Nitmiluk (which is the aboriginal word for the gorge.)

Olivia and Mary hiking above the gorge before going down to the water.

It was beautiful!

You could easily spend a week kayaking up the gorge and camping along the sides (as there were maps showing novice kayakers where to stop and set up camp along the river and where the best waterfalls were, and how to watch out for crocodiles etc.... We planned on renting some kayaks and paddling our way up to at least two of the gorges (which would have taken around 4 hours), and just making a day of it...

Sadly we were informed that since we had three kids we could not fit in the two man kayaks. They wouldn't let us put more than one kid with a parent on a kayak...So we had to opt for the tour boat (see that grey boat in the background?)

The boat tour did the two first gorges in half the time (2 hours) and we were able to hear some of the aboriginal stories about the gorge from an aboriginal tour guide. It was cool because the Aussie government gave the aborigines their land back in the 1980's (quite recently) and as a result many of the aboriginal communities have been able to set up businesses and thrive while keeping a lot of their culture alive through tourism. They informed us that the entire boat company was owned and operated by an aboriginal family, which was very cool.

Here we are at the first stop admiring an aboriginal rock painting. Since it is the dry season the river is low and we have to get off to transfer to another boat that can take us the rest of the way up the gorge.

See the red?

Some of those trees behind me are called melaleuca trees (you know like that healthy store in the USA?) well the leaves are picked and burned and if you stand in the smoke, the smell of the melaleuca leaves acts as a natural bug repellent. If you don't have time to burn them you can pick them and just rub them on your skin.

During the wet season this gorge is covered in waterfalls (I expect it would be stunning)- they told us if we could see black lines coming down the rocks then that is a path where the water runs off.

See the black lines?

Unfortunately, during the wet season it is extremely difficult to get out here as some of the road are covered in water. In addition, the wet season also brings in the salt water crocodiles which are then trapped and brought out during the dry season so the tourist don't get eaten while on their kayaks.

I kept thinking, how do you know if you have all the crocs out of this huge gorge? They showed us some rubber balls along the sides of the rocks. They said the crocodiles like to bite these balls. They check the balls every day and if they see a bite mark, they know there is a croc here. To trap them out they hang bits of  meat in areas where balls have been bit. They position the meat near the sides of the gorge in areas that resemble small caves. When the crocs jump up to eat the hanging chicken/ kangaroo they release a trap door behind them and are enclosed in an area small enough for the rangers to them move them somewhere else...don't ask me how they do that bit.
So after that speech, it should be noted that I did see a little crocodile in the water! But it was a freshwater crocodile which tends not to eat people...unless by accident (kind of like sharks).

After our boat tour we use the toilets...um how cool are these signs?

And then we hit the road. On our way we started seeing some unusual trees (that then we saw non-stop for the next 20 hours) What was cool about the northern territory was the dark red dirt contrasted with these really cool trees! below is a giant boab tree (kin to africa's baobab tree)

 As we exited the park we also made a quick stop to see the Cutta-Cutta caves- they are known to have bats and snakes in them...

This was Thomas's first cave tour.

Unfortunately we didn't see any animals (as anticipated) and during world war 2 the soldiers used these caves to have parties and to take shot practice in, so a lot of the stalactites and stalagmites were ruined :-(