Top End Tour: On the Road to Kakadu

The drive from Darwin, capital city of the Northern Territory, to Kakadu National Park was both longer and more stressful than we had hoped.  The monsoon rains had mercifully ceased, but flooding closed many roads, including the Arnhem Highway, the most direct route.  Other roads were open only to 4WD vehicles, and so we stopped at the airport in a vain attempt to trade our minivan for a more robust truck.  Not surprisingly, nothing was available for a family of six, and to add to our problems, the motel reception in Kakadu phoned us to advise that 1) the only remaining road leading to the park would possibly be closed any minute, and 2) the entire park might be forced to evacuate before nightfall.

We decided to take our chances as the motel staff promised to ring as further information became available.  I lost my phone signal almost immediately, however, and we resigned ourselves to the uncertainty.  It wasn't long before we encountered our first road train, a common sight in Australia's Top End where distances are long, and towns are very few and far between.

As you can probably tell from the following photos, taken through the windshield of our van as we pulled out to pass, road trains are a force with which to reckon.  Fortunately, there are few cars on the road, so passing them usually doesn't take too long.

Empty roads are common as Australia's third-largest state or territory in terms of size is very sparsely populated.  With the most recent figures estimating the population to be around 230,000 people, the Northern Territory contains only 1% of the country's inhabitants.  Of those 230,000, over 30% are indigenous, and this difference from Victoria's 1% (where we live) we noticed right away.  There are few sealed roads, and rather than the population congregating along the coast as it does in all of the other states in Australia, in the Northern Territory, nearly everyone lives along the Stuart Highway.  This famous highway connects Darwin in the North to Adelaide in the South at a length of nearly 1800 miles.

Several hours later, we finally made it into Kakadu in spite of the rising river levels.  We marveled at the beauty of the reflections caused by the pooling water as the sunset, and also came across our first dingo in the wild.  Unfortunately he appeared to be emaciated, and we concluded that he must have lost his mother.

We met very few other travelers on the road, but we did arrive without incident at the Gagadju Resort located near the middle of Kakadu National Park, an area that I mentioned in my last post is nearly the size of West Virginia.  The staff who greeted us remarked that it was unlikely we would be evacuated, but that the only road leading north was closed, and that furthermore, the water cruise we had hoped to take in the morning was closed until further notice due to turbulent water.  

With this unwelcome news, we unpacked and ordered dinner.  As unlikely as it sounds in the middle of what felt like nowhere, the food was amazingly good.  Cameron and Ross enjoyed perfectly grilled barramundi served on a bed of polenta and spinach, while the rest of us devoured wood-fired pizza topped with pesto and fresh tomato.  Barramundi (usually shortened to "barra" in the Top End) turned out to be our favorite food of the trip.  It is found in abundance in the waters around Darwin, and is a delicious, firm but mild-tasting fish, and therefore very popular.

Dinner was followed with all members of the family taking a nighttime swim in the immaculate pool. With the water about the same temperature as the air---approximately 85 degrees F, it felt wonderful, and we headed to bed hoping for better road and river conditions in the morning.

 

 

 

Comments

[Nikki]

I would have been a nervous wreck traveling with those road trains!

[Christie]

Ross is a cautious driver so I was never nervous. We did have to follow one for half an hour once but otherwise they didn't give us much trouble.

[Linda Renaud]

I enjoyed your road train pictures. We only encountered two road trains in our Outback travels, each having just three trailers.

[Shanda]

That photo of Sophie is beautiful.