I agonized between a trip to the Tiwi Islands or the exploration of the Darwin estuary. At the end the estuary pulled me to it, so I took my little car and headed south, backtracking 70 kilometers on the road I had come in from Alice. I mentioned before that much of the shoulder of the highway has been burnt, presumably a controlled burn to limit the accumulation of dead wood and shrubs that could fuel a big fire. It is just not very pretty. However, as soon as I turned into smaller roads to approach the estuary, the scorched forest was replaced by a rich coastal monsoon forest.
You probably know that the monsoon season in India and Southeast Asia happens between April and September, when a high pressure zone develops over Australia so the wind blows from the southeast across the Indian Ocean and the Timor Sea to bring heavy rain in the aforementioned India and Southeast Asia. At the same time Australia goes through The Dry (season). Conditions start to change in September, when the high pressure zone shifts over the Himalayas, causing northwesterly winds to cool India and then blow over the Indian Ocean, bringing The Wet (season) into the Top End. The rain can then be very significant in the Kimberly and Darwin areas, which is why we have the development of the coastal monsoon forests here.
The Darwin estuary looks like a hand with fingers pointing down; the wrist, at the northern end, is where the city of Darwin is located, while the fingers are the different embayments, where salt and fresh water interact to create a heaven for mangroves, crocs, and any number of boas, fishes, and birds. I must confess I was ... hesitant ... to go walking through this wonderland, so I cheated and instead visited a wildlife park, where for a fee I could walk in relative safety through the forest and its bizarre looking trees and palms. I also saw wallabies (in fact, one of them was so close to me that I broke my cardinal rule of not touching wild animals and gave it a good pat in the rump) and water buffaloes, all sorts of birds, parrots, and paraqueets, a very fine aquarium with a great variety of estuarine species, and Nocturnal House where it was so dark that I could barely see my hand, and a fascinating presentation about the fish and rip rays that are found in the sandy bottom of the estuary channels. The most prized catch is the barramundi, a particularly ugly fish that has the distinction of being male while it is young. And you know how boys are: it sows its wild oats while he grows up, and gets caught and eaten by people. Then, the few that survive to achieve lengths of a meter or more (and probably weigh at 40 kg plus), spontaneously transform into females and are responsible for spawning the next generation. Did I mention it is an ugly fish? However, it is a fat ugly fish, and the Aborigines very much favor it as a prize catch.
Living in the same coastal lagoon are very large rip rays. The three we saw were at least a meter in diameter, had a two meter tail, and loved to be fed by hand by the ranger (who stuck his whole hand holding a small fish into their cavernous mouths). Apparently they are naturally friendly, with crocs and sharks being their only predators, but they carry a nasty barb at the base of their tails, that they can lift to a 45 degree angle and punch into whoever they don't like (Armando II and Armando III can attest to this very painful dislike).
I also attended a bird show training session, in which the ranger, rather than trying to put a show for the handful of people who were there, took the time to explain how he trains the birds, and put them through their paces to reinforce their behaviors.
I am spending the night at a holiday park just outside of the Litchfield National Park, which will be the adventure for tomorrow. For now I better go to the restaurant before it closes. I think I will have barramundi for dinner.
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