Rockart

I’m a few days behind so here is yesterdays blip. I’m spoilt for choice as I took hundreds of photos. First we drove 70km north of our campsite to see the Ubirr rock art which is different from the usual stencils of hands that adorn caves and rocks from thousands of years ago, these show more detail and x-ray vision showing bones and other bits and pieces - I’m guessing this is a man. Near the rocks was a climb showing the surrounding countryside. Beautiful. 

 We went to Cahills Crossing nearby where you get great views of crocodiles at high tide. This is a hundred kilometres inland but they still get 8m tides when the crocs all line up to catch the fish at change of tide. We weren’t there at the right time but they say it’s one of the most dangerous crossings in the NT. It is on the East Alligator River.

We had morning tea at Jabiru where I posted a previous blip. Jabiru has a shopping complex with police station, post office and medical centre which looked about 20 years old. Unfortunately it looked like it had no repairs or up keep since that time. Jabiru has had uranium mining ( Ranger and Jabiluka) nearby and some tourism and the local Aboriginal community living there. It is within the Kakadu National Park. 

We drove back to out camp at Cooinda which we were disappointed with. The sites are tiny, dusty, no staff to maintain the place and hot and expensive. It was too hot in the van and too many mozzies outside. We had booked the evening Yellow Water cruise which was lovely out on the waterways. Beautiful vistas of swamplands with flowering lotus lilies. Plenty of crocodiles, water buffalo, wild horses and millions of birds of many different species.  Worthwhile to see. Kakadu is huge. It is hundreds of kilometres and the roads are on the higher lands which are lined with scrubby trees and termite mounds. We can’t say it’s attractive. The waterways are great but we can’t spend all our time on them as it’s about $50/ hour at yesterdays rate. Much of the park is underwater in the wet season, that must look amazing.,