Litchfield

Thursday, December 3, 2009

Talk about a fated meeting. I had yet to see the North except for Darwin but I didn’t have anywhere near enough money for a tour of Kakadu. Kate had already been on a tour but she wanted the chance to go back by herself before she got stuck at work in Darwin. The car rental gave unlimited mileage, however only for a 3 day rental, so what the heck we thought, and went for it. I paid for the car, Kate paid for everything else. At 5 the next morning we headed into the outback.

We figured we would head into Litchfield, the nearest National Park and see as much as possible in a day then travel to Kakadu for the next 2 days. We loaded up and jumped in the car, put on the first of a bunch of CD’s I had made for the trip and off we rolled. Half asleep I was staring quite blankly out of the window when I noticed the sun, just popping up over the horizon in the wing mirror, screeching to a halt we hopped out and took the fist bit of footage of the journey, we had begun! We made another stop just as the temperature was getting unbearable, at about 8 O’clock to film the remains of a bush fire still smoking, handily placed just for us to notice it. Eventually we made it to our first intended stop at a beautiful fall, the heat being already way into the unbearable stage at about 9 O’clock but luckily the sun wasn’t yet high enough to shine over the fall so the whole place was in shade, plus of course there was water to swim in. Majestic and beautiful it would have made a perfect place to film; typically I had forgotten the camera.

We swam and Snorkelled a little as Kate had brought goggles, spying lots of fish but mostly murky darkness that kind of freaked me out a little, I don’t like deep water. However it did mean I knew where the rocks were underwater so when I climbed up the fall I knew where to jump back in and where I would have a slightly less comfortable landing. When we got out Kate said that if you dropped some bread in the water hundreds of fish would appear out of nowhere, so to prove it she did. The bread hit the water and one nanosecond later every fish in the known galaxy was suddenly fighting over the one measly bit of bread. Literally there were more fish than water and they seemed to pop straight out of the rocks, never before have I seen a fish pop out of nowhere like that and certainly not in the thousands, quite a spectacle. Time for our own food we went and found a little stream for our picnic and conversed about Angels and the taste of Ants whilst a dragonfly flew in the same pattern for about half an hour right next to us. Perhaps it wanted our food or maybe it had been given bad directions, who knows.

When we got back to the car I was genuinely shocked, it wasn’t even midday yet and yet the car was hotter than a poker pulled from a fire, we had barely begun, and for the next few days there was nowhere for me to hide, I was living in the harsh hot and entirely real outback. At least we had air con in the car for a brief respite before arriving at our next stop, where we actually filmed something and it turned out to be perfect. We went off the beaten track to find a little section of river complete with Goanna’s, a little fall and a snorkelling experience that resembled swimming through an underwater city. My hope of living till the end of the day was restored as soon as I got in the water and my body temp dropped from about 120 to 45.

We stayed at a campsite that night and realised when we got there that we hadn’t quite prepared for this trip. We had no swag, no tent, only one sleeping bag between us and just a billy can to cook with. Somehow we managed, we borrowed a tarp, which we put on the grass as it would be softer than our designated dirt square, I used a sleeping bag liner and Kate used her Sleeping bag, luckily it didn’t rain. For food we improvised, beans I ate cold out of the can, toast we made on a barbecue, sausages were easy, veg… hmm… never mind, we had oranges, that’s healthy right?