It's been a while since I could send email so I need to catch up.  Here's a little bit of news about what's been going on.

 Last time we "talked" I was in Darwin.  On Thursday I rode my bike to the airport and prepared it for shipping by removing the mirrors, windscreen, and disconnecting and taping the battery terminals.  I got a quick hazardous materials inspection and handed the bike over to the Quantas air freight guys.  That was simple, and cheap - about $900A total, or $750 US dollars.  Shipping by sea would have cost me about $600US and taken about 2 weeks, and almost certainly would have meant more hassles at the Singapore port. Air freighting the bike was a no-brainer in this case.

 On Friday morning I was picked up for a 3 day camping and 4-wheel drive tour of Kakadu National Park.  Kakadu is a very large park on the flood plains east of Darwin.  The park was formed in typical Australian fasion - as a compromise between groups that wanted to preserve the area, develop the area, and return the area to the aboriginals.  All of these groups met and worked out a plan to create this huge national park that's run in cooperation with the aboriginals, and which has several small areas from which they extract uranium and other resources.  Impressive how they manage to do all those things in the park.

 From Darwin we drove about 3 hours to the southern entrance of the park.  We set up our tents along a remote creek and did some 4-wheel driving to several remote waterfall pools to swim.  Some of the falls were very high and it was fun to swim below them.  It has been an extremely wet May in Darwin.  Usually the rains stop in May and everything dries up, but this month they have been getting constant rain, much to the amazement of the locals.  Because of all this rain, the waterfalls and pools were quite full.  The water was much warmer than my last swim on the Tablelands.  The scenery in general was not as impressive as the rain forests around Cairns, but was still very nice. 

 Later that night after cooking our dinner (vegetarian burritos!) we grabbed our torches (flashlights for you Yanks) and went looking for freshies - fresh water crocodiles.  We managed to spot a couple along the banks of the low river, by looking for their eyes that reflect bright red in the torch light - very spooky.

 The next day we drove on some bad roads to more cascades and pools to do more swimming.  Since we weren't getting showers on this trip, the swims were refreshing.  Later in the afternoon we walked through some cliffs with very old aboriginal rock art.  At dusk we went to a place called Yellow Waters - a billabong with a raised walk along the edge of the water.  I sure was glad for that raised walk when we spotted Bluto - the largest croc in this billabong who's about 5 meters (15+ feet) long!  He swam within about 20 feet of us in the dusk.

 That night we camped along another beautiful billabong.  The downside of the beautiful water were the swarms of mosquitos that plagued us.  A little DEET took care of most of them.  The bonus was the sunrise over the billabong the next morning - quite magical.  Later we learned that 2 years ago a girl had been eaten by a large croc right on the other side of this very billabong.  We visited the spot of the attack, but not for a swim!

 The third day we saw more rock art and climbed to a high point where we could see the park in all directions.  Finally we visited a private billabong and took a boat ride.  We saw Fish Eagles and numerous other bright birds, buffalos, frogs, and other critters.  But the exciting moment was spotting the 6 meter (18+ feet) 2,200 pound croc - perhaps the largest croc in the world as it was explained that Australia crocs are typically larger than the other species, and this is one of the largest in Australia!  This croc hadn't been seen for several days so we lucky to spot it.  We were told that they regularly see this croc taking full-size buffalo from the water's edge.  That must be impressive!

 After the boat ride it was a 2 hour ride back to Darwin.

 Kakadu is a very nice park because of its vastness and its abundance of wildlife.  I don't think any of the scenery is overwhelming, but still quite beautiful.  I should add that we didn't get to visit some of the falls because of the extreme wet so perhaps there were even better places in the park that we missed.  If you're in Darwin I would recommend a visit to Kakadu.  Just keep your hands and feet inside the boat when they warn you!

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