I am glamping, seated in an air-conditioned room with TV at
the Kakadu Lodge, but still having to go to the outdoor facilities like any ol’
camper. Considering I am paying AUS$ 185 for the privilege, I now feel obliged
to make the most of my available privileges.
Going back to the beginning of the day, after leaving Darwin
I ran a good 100 km to a decommissioned dam named Fogg Dam. This dam was built
in the 50’s, when the powers that be in the Northern Territories province (one
of the six states that form Australia) were trying to jump start the local
economy by creating a regional rice agricultural industry (I suspect they got
the idea from the Sacramento River rice-growing region). The Adelaide River was
going to play the role of the Sacramento River, and a couple of small holding
dams were built on tributaries of the Adelaide River. But they didn’t have a
large volume reservoir to feed the system (e.g., like the Shasta or Oroville
dams), and the Adelaide is prone to going dry in drought periods, so the whole
scheme went bust. Fogg Dam eventually filled up with sediment, and it is now a
wading-birds preserve. Unfortunately the crocodiles soon moved in, so
bird-watchers have been warned not to walk along the dam. I am not a
bird-watcher, so I took a happy stroll along the dam, admiring the birds and
looking for crocs. Lots of the first type, none of the latter type.
Another 65 km brought me to the Corroboree Billabong, for
the pleasure of taking an air-boat ride (you know the type from The Everglades
in Florida, with a giant fan propeller in the back). As I mentioned before, a
billabong is a slough (pronounced sloo) formed in particularly flat
flood plains. When the Adelaide River floods, the water spreads over thousands
of square kilometers, and fish and crocs move freely from the coast inland. As the
flood waters recede, many of these visitors get stranded in billabongs, which hold
water during the long dry season; the longer the dry season, the less water is
available, so the crocs, fishes, and birds get concentrated in a smaller and
smaller slough.
There are two types of crocs: The smaller and more elegant
fresh water crocs are relatively shy and don’t pose much of a threat, except to
birds. The bigger and much meaner saltwater crocs, or “salties” are the ones
everyone keeps warning you about. They are big, they are fast, and they are not
afraid to go after wild pigs or people. They can see in color, so they are
particularly attracted to bright orange floating vests. We saw both types in
our ride, and I can vouch for the fact that salties trigger our primordial
fears. Our guide told us that she and her sons collect croc eggs in the off
season, to sell them to croc farms where they hatch and raise them for their
skin and meat. Each female croc can lay 50 to 80 eggs in a nest that she keeps
at just the right temperature by adding rotting leaves for heat, or by wetting
the mound to cool it down. Depending on demand, a viable croc egg can go for
AUS$ 25 to 45, por a total payback of AUS$ 1,500 to 3,000. I am not sure I
would like to gamble a foot at those odds!
We also saw quite a few big birds. We saw sea eagles with
white heads, a dark-colored crane with an enormous wing-span, and any number of
egrets and herons. An interesting factoid is that all these birds mate for
life, and that if you see one, then his or her mate is probably within sighting
distance. Our Aussie guide claimed that sea eagles are bigger than bald eagles,
probably because she has never seen a bald eagle close distance!
Another 100 km brought me to the doors of the Kakadu
National Park, which boasts being the largest national park of Australia. I am
a bit under-impressed, no doubt because after another 70 km I was still
crossing a savanna of little eucalyptus trees and dwarf palms (that is what you
get with the big flooding). One amazing thing were the termite mounds, which form
clusters of mud and sand ghosts, a good 4 m tall. Another feature worth
mentioning are the burn areas you see everywhere; apparently the aboriginal
tribes have used fire at the very start of the dry season as a way of keeping
the low forest healthy. Setting the fires while the grasses and weeds are not
completely dry allows them to burn “cooler”, so the fire cannot damage the
trees, which simply shed their outside slightly burnt skin at the start of the
next rainy season. Maybe we could learn something useful from the Traditional
Custodians of the land for our own fire-management efforts in California.
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