Kakadu Day 2

Anbangbang rock art

Nabulwinjbulwinj, the guy with the yam and an issue with women

Lightning Man on the right (carrying lightning over his head)

View from Anbangbang lookout

Anbangbang lookout

Today we moved on from our campground at Merl, near Ubirr, which was a shame really because it was a really nice one, and headed first to Jabiru. I don’t really know much about the town except that I think it’s a mining one like Tom Price, mainly set up for the people who work at the Ranger mine and their families, and probably for people who work at the national park as well (although they’d be in the minority). It’s smaller than Tom Price but has all the essentials from our point of view – fuel, supermarket, newsagency, library, bakery and public pool (which the Ralhs highly recommended). We spent a while at the library where the kids were very impressed at the wide selection of books that they would like, and we tried to copy as many audio books as we could in the short time.  After we had half an Emily Rodda book we decided we’d taken long enough and drove down to our next campsite for 2 nights, at Muirella. It’s a nice one too but not as shady as Merl, but the with same nice solar showers which have a huge rose hanging down from the ceiling (like at your rental Helene) which blasts all over you. Nick loves it but I find it a bit hard to keep my hair from getting wet! Nice to have a shower anyway since it’s really hot here! We were here by lunchtime which was also a nice change, so we had lunch in the tent – we’re even putting up the annex walls here because of the apparently voracious mozzies – and then headed to Ahnbangbang for some more rock art and ranger talks. It wasn’t quite as prolific as at Ubirr but still pretty good – we had the same ranger woman giving the talks and boy she really loves her job, even though she’s only employed for 6 months at a time (for the dry season) she comes back every year.

We have both been getting a really peaceful feeling about the places we’ve been so far at Kakadu – apart from the first sunset at Ubirr there really aren’t that many tourists, or at least not where we are, and we were expecting it to be overrun at this time of year. The walk around Anbangbang (how’s that for another cool name) also included another lookout with a view down to the south of Kakadu which again was beautiful. The ranger mentioned that a long time ago it used to mostly be covered by sea with the cliffs in the distance sticking up out of it, which you can really imagine because the woodland is now so flat. The kids liked one of the rock art pictures of Nabulwinjbulwinj, who used to lie in wait for women and hit them over the head (killing them) with a yam. Beware the killer sweet potato!!!

After that it was a brief walk around the deserted Ahnbangbang Billabong which was lovely, although we were a bit uneasy and didn’t linger what with all of the crocodile warning signs (which are there permanently), although I doubt that all of those birds would be hanging around if they were about to get eaten.