We are entering Kakadu National Park from the south along the Kakadu Highway; our first overnight stop is Cooinda about 165km away. Kakadu National Park is a dual listed World Heritage site covering 20,000 sq km and comprising a wide variety of landscapes and habitats including lush wetlands, savannah woodland, monsoon forest, towering escarpments and coastal mangroves, only some of which we will get to see on this trip. We are planning to travel as far as Ubirr on the eastern border with Arnhem Land and then double back to make our way to Katherine and onwards to Broome.
Aboriginal people have lived in this area and Arnhem Land for more than 50,000 years and continue to make up the majority of the population today. The Park is steeped in their cultural history and one of the major highlights is the rock art as Nourangie and Ubirr. Kakadu is owned by the traditional owners (Aborigines) and leased back to the government as a national park and managed jointly.
Most of the journey from Pine Creek has been through savannah woodland; sparsely spread eucalypt and pandanus palms and dense tall grass, with some wetland here and there. Most of Kakadu is covered in woodland and here the grass is brown and we pass the occasional small bush fire. These fires are important for the regeneration of the land and we pass areas of scorched earth where lush green shoots of new grass are beginning to come through.
We stop overnight at the main caravan park a Cooinda which has a shaded pool offering welcome relief from the overwhelming heat. Despite the long Easter weekend, the camp grounds have plenty of space and we are able to pick an out-of-the-way pitch under the trees. But it isn’t quiet for long; someone has pop music blaring and a somewhat dysfunctional family attempt to pitch their tents alongside us. After a while it is clear that this is their first foray into camping, and as night falls they are still struggling with one of the tents which they eventually abandon for lack of light. Long after we’ve gone to bed, they decide to light an open fire to ward off the deluge of mosquitoes, despite the fact that, as everyone knows, open fires are banned because of the high risk of bush fires. But it doesn’t burn for long before a camp warden is on the case and the fire is extinguished.
Mozzies! There is a plague of the little buggers tonight. We have never seen anything like it and we have to resort to setting up a mozzie net inside the van. There are so many, the air is filled with their constant whine. We have two coils burning and have double-dosed on the repellant, but all to no avail and we retreat early to bed to escape being eaten alive!
We are beginning to realise that Kakadu is not the most hospitable place at this time of year.