Kangaroo Island
Hello, hello 🙂
I'm back ... Saturday and Sunday on Kangaroo Island have been great!
I got up at around 5 am to be collected at the university later. At first we were only 3 people that were taken down to Kangaroo Island. First thing we did there was visiting a nice beach and Propect Hill (well, it's been renamed to Mount Thifty or sth. as Prospect is a rather bad precinct of Adelaide). Kind of sounds like nothing, but by then it was already lunch time. That's where we caught up to the guys from the 3-day tour with their guide with our's heading back to the mainland.
I'll not bother you with all the details, but just the highlights. We saw seals (close, i.e. about 20m), New Zealand sea lions (somewhat further away in their cave), penguins (very close, i.e. about 1m). Then there were the Remarkable Rocks and lots of other stuff to see 🙂
Lets's get some impressions of it now:
New Zealand Fur-Seals on Kangaroo Island
One of the Remarkable Rocks
Seals at Seal Bay
Kakadu National Park
The night had been short when we got up at 4.45 a.m. to wait for our tour guide to pick us up at 5.50 a.m. With six other people and Jeff – our guide – we headed off to Kakadu. Kakadu is Australia's largest national park as it's twice the size of Belgium. It is 150km east of Darwin. We had three days to see everything.
First day:
- watching crocodiles (salties and freshies – don't swim with the salties; they'll eat you) and beautiful birds from a boat in the Mary River Wetlands (billabong)
- enjoying wonderful Aboriginal rock art at Ubirr; gorgeous view over Nadab flood plain and at Arnhem Land
great fire camp, didgeridoo and camping at Muirella Park
Second day:
- learning about Aboriginal traditions: Playing the didgeridoo, getting to know Aboriginal hand craft, cooking the Aboriginal way and throwing spears at the pink pig 🙂
- visiting the Twin Falls: It actually took us about 2 hrs for about 70 km on a street only allowed for 4WD vehicles. We had a boat carrying us to the falls through a wonderful valley up to the path that led to the Twin Falls where would then go to by foot.
- visiting the Jim Jim Falls: We climbed over rocks about one kilometer to reach the base of Jim Jim. Right now the falls are dry as it's the dry season. As this is a place where there are no crocodiles directly at the falls we could go for a swim right to the base.
- overnight camping at Maguk
Third day:
- swimming in awesome plunge pools high up at Barramundi Gorge
- visiting Yellow Water to see some crocodiles
- having a look at some of the termite mounts (there are thousands of them)
- watching wild horses next to Old Jim Jim Road
- heading back to Darwin