Kakadu walking again. Is it ever possible to have too much Kakadu?

The road to Gunmarr campground is the world’s least 4wd rd. Nevertheless, we were the only 2wd vehicles there. Our vans weren't going to make the last section though, so our plan was to wander around camp asking for a lift into the falls the next day. We only got as far as asking the host where we could leave the vans. He said he was heading in at 545am if we could be up that early. Yep, we definitely could! He also suggested we move our vans over next to his site so we didn’thave to move them in the morning and it turned out to be quiet and shady.  When I went over to leave our leftover food with some people we had met on the other side, it was like walking into Hades, with the darkness broken by fires, smoke and noise everywhere. Our peace on the our side was only disturbed by some nesting curlews. One would start screaming, then the other reply from the other side of camp. For such a raucous sound, they look very effortless making it. The male barely moved from his pose under the host’s caravan, where he stood so still he could be mistaken for a support post. 

We are up for 545 and start walking in the dark. My deteriorating distance vision turns out to be a major problem walking on uneven ground by torchlight. So, I was slow until the light improved, but we would still have made the top for sunrise, except Abby saw a rainbow pitta. I was ordered to stop and she peered intently, raving about how gorgeous it was and how she’d wanted to see one for ages. I can’t see a thing. I turn my pack over for my glasses and binoculars, and Abby tries to tell me where it is, but have you every tried describing where a tiny bird in a patch of rainforest is? It’s almost impossible. But how is it that I cannot see a rainbow coloured bird? He looks like a leaf, Abby tells me. How can a rainbow look like a leaf in a sea of brown leaf litter? I fail to see it and we move on.

 

Somehow, I’d forgotten all the false creek lines along the top. When we eventually hit the main creek, we are starving for second breakfast and head upstream for a pool and place to make tea. By the time we leave our quiet pool to see the falls, dozens of people are there, but I did get talking to a local walker who gave us some tips on art sites. My eye for art is much better than my eye for birds, and I find 3 sites over the next few kilometres before we spy a shady sand bank on the far side of the creek and call it camp. I had walked in this area with Alison 3 years ago, so my mission was to find different amazing campsites and get to a few places we hadn’t then. Finding art we had missed was an added bonus. 

A spider runs out of the kindling as I am light our fire, and I attempt to relocate him when I demonstrate the limits of my spider tolerance by screaming and dropping the stick as it runs towards me. Abby turns out to have no spider issues at all and picks it up in her hands, coos at how cute it is, has a little conversation with it and carries it away.

The moon that night is full, and so bright we could almost have walked all night by it. Instead we escaped the mozzies and crawled into the tent and Abby beat me at Oh Hell a lot. I may have said a lot of variants of Oh Hell. A strange repeating whoosh whoosh noise passes over head. It doesn’t sound like an animal. More like an animated winged machine sent out to hunt us by the dystopian state formed in a covid ravaged world. Ok, maybe I have been reading too much young adult sci fi. They were fruit bats.

We have a leisurely start, then head off art hunting. We explore a forest of rock sculptures, stumpy little towers with caves and squeeze throughs but only small remnants of art until Abby crawled on her back under a low roof and found the ceiling covered. We stop to swim and spy some large boulders with an overhang, and head up to find a major art site with Bradshaw figures, Mimi art, more recent fish, turtles and kangaroos and some white and yellow art in a style that I have not seen up here before. 

On my first walk here many years ago, we had come across the escarpment to hit the creek just upstream from here at a long deep dark pool lines by pandanus and paperbark. If you were on the flood plains, it would be full of crocs. It’s still hard to rid yourself of the fear of crocs even when you know it is impossible, but having walked up the hill to get here certainly helps.

The creek disappears just down stream of that pool, and on that first trip, I hadn’t yet learnt that creeks often run underground and reappear on the escarpment, so we were quite perturbed. We also ended up on the overflow channel, so it was quite some time before we rediscover the water at a giant y shaped pool. In 2018, we’d decided to cut a few corners here, thinking the creek continued like this. And where we rejoined it, it was like this. Somewhere in the middle is an area known as the monoliths that I didn’t know about at the, which has since closed to walkers so I’ll never be able to seeit now. But there were a few kilometres of creek before then that I hadn’t seen, so we slogged along a buffalo trail by the dark pool. Then I realised I wasn’t wearing my hat. Whilst I am searching my pack for it, I spy a water monitor swimming across the pool. I don’t spy my hat. I must have left it at our last swim, so some other walker will score my Bike Melrose hat, proudly won at the Melrose 18 hour. The next pool (these pools are about 1 km long) is clear and blue, with shady banks on the far side. 

We go for a quick reccy upstream, over massive rock shelves with shallow cascades before making camp. The shallow creek upstream had taken the edge off the water temperature and it was perfect for long swims, with brown honeyeaters zipping down the drink water all around us. We lounge around with tea and gingernuts.

Abby’s mat had gone flat the previous night, so she blows it up, jumps in the water with it and has me laughing hysterically at her antics to get it under water to find the hole. No hole was found. Reading the instructions reveals she had not done the newfangled valve on it up properly. She goes on some bird hunts whilst I do a cryptic. She drags me on bird hunts and I make her learn cryptics. Our peace is constantly disturbed by a wailing kitten, or actually, some bird that evades all Abby’s efforts to find it. 

The agents of the dystopian state rush in again as the sun sets and gorge on the grevillea nectar, its delicious scent released by the warm night, and I’m lounging on the sand writing when Abby points out all the spiders have come out to hunt on the sand bank. I shine my torch around me and discover I am surrounded by wolf spiders. I am slightly less comfortable now. The full moon rises red on the horizon, then mozzies join the fray and we retreat to modern luxury of a tent.

This time we did start early. We were off bearing south over the escarpment and Abby showed me a screen on my GPS I had never seen before. I call it the cheater screen now, because it does everything – the direction you need to go, distance, speed, time to arrival, will there be a cup of tea there …. Walking is cruisy until we hit an area of rock towers. Rocky country here can be easy walking over slabs and gravel or desperate climbing up and down with gullies of spinifex in between. This was the latter. We skirt around the outside, with a few quick dashes in to look for art. Through a thankfully dry swamp, then burnt country making easy walking to our next creek. A half metre wide trench of running water splits the burnt country, but the catchment is tiny and we are at the top of it! Where is all the water coming from? We follow it down and the land flattens, turning to quagmire and buffalo wallow and we find ourselves landlocked. Retreat, then some precarious sludge hopping gets us to dry land again. It’s hard to tell how solid the raised patch you are jumping for is and I am grateful for my waterproof boots, despite the heat.

We decide lunch is in order at the next nice bit of creek in case more boggy, vegetated creek nonsense awaited. It didn’t, and the creek turned into a stunning gorge with perfect rock platforms. We had intended to walk further, but it was hot, and it was a perfect campsite. We stayed.

Second lunch, cups of tea, gingernuts and swims later and we go for an explore. We suss out an exit route on the far side of the gorge but it was desperate rocky nonsense, and continued down towards the edge of the escarpment, dodging giant spiders, snakes and green ants. It soon became too unpleasant to bash further and we retreated. Our dystopian overlords send swarms of black dragon flies to check on us this night.

 

I’m awake at 530 and it’s so light with the full moon I get up and start my tea ritual. It is hard to keep sleeping when you have been in bed for over 10 hours. There’s no need to rush this morning, but there’s something nice about being up for dawn. We head upstream on the escarpment for ease of walking, and after a cruisy 700m, we hit the creek again at some lovely cascades and it looks good to camp. It’s only 8am. We both dump packs and go for an explore, fail to catch up with each other and I’ve wandered a kilometre up stream past almost constant cascades to where the water just disappears. I cross the rock to walk down the far bank when I am stopped short by bog. Endless bog. After 30 minutes of trying to get through, I retreat with tail between my legs. That is where all the water is coming from anyway.

I hadn’t completely lost Abby and we headed down stream. The top gorge is phenomenal, with falls into a squarecut gorge that does a 90 degree turn into more falls and more falls. We relocate camp to the second tier which has a perfect camp shower next to it and we sit under the cascades and make tea on rocky ledges overlooking the lower gorge.

A drone whines in the distance. We’ve heard this before, and Abby is not buying my dystopian fiction. She thinks the drone is a chestnut button quail. Abby realises she has lost her sunnies and decides to follow the gorge down to our last camp (it is only a few hundred metres as the crow flies). We climb down a chimney, paddle across some pools, scramble down another gully and eventually pop out in the section beneath our last camp. No sign of sunnies, so Abby reverses our whole morning whilst I chill out at camp, to no avail.

 

My memory is a very fickle thing. I often have detailed recall of where I’ve walked, trails I’ve ridden, routes I’ve climbed. Of course, I can never remember where I’ve put my keys, but still, I’m good with the important things. So, it always comes as a shock to me when I don’t remember something. On this occasion, it was the entire section of gorge we were at. I’d walked across here from Twin Falls in 2006, and it had been quite dry that year, so it had been a long, long day until we found water somewhere in those cascades up stream. I remember the cascades. We collapsed and camped with relief. It’s the next day that does my head in. We had walked down the gorge, there was lots of rockhopping with heavy packs and not a lot of room to navigate between rock, water, pandanus and orb spiders. I was super tired and after nearly walking into yet another spider bigger than my hand, I was so traumatised we escaped up the next creek line. So, I have walked down this creek before, but all I could remember was the trauma!

 

Our early start was slightly delayed by not hearing the sound of the alarm over the cascades, but we were still walking by 0640. There’s a lot of rock and complicated looking terrain on the map, with the possibility of not having any water and needing to continue on to Twin falls. We are buoyed at the first creek we hoped to find water in because it is a gorgeous trickle in a little glade where we stop to refresh and skull. Beautiful rock country like an enchanted forest of rock towers gives way to not so beautiful waist high spinifex in chunky loose boulders.

Hopeful creek number 2 is dry, but we do find some art. There’s probably more but we don’t have time to hunt. We come to the creek of disappointment around midday. It is a dry bed in thick rainforest, heading towards falls off the edge of the escarpment, which are currently 100m cliffs with a manky pool above them. Abby sits in the dry creek bed to eat as it’s the least infested place with green ants.

 

Make do with treating manky water and no swimming? The decision is made to keep slogging on towards Twin Creek. We head up stream; it’s hot and muggy in the rainforest and after 2 near misses with orb spiders, I send Abby ahead as spider warden. We make it out and are relieved to find some easy walking as we are knackered. We make waypoints to keep us motivated to continue a while before collapsing again. Sometimes they are only 600m apart.

 

The next creeks are dry, but we are so excited to discover the land burnt. Easy kms pass until we hit the final creek down to Twin. Just as we are nearly there, things fall into fiasco. We lose our shit over green ants. We kinda give up on navigating and just bash through the direct line to the creek. I twist my ankle and by the time we are on the last slope to the creek I have a little tanty when Abby says there are only 10m to go. Then there is water and pristine camp. On the far bank. Abby offers to ferry the packs around and I swim for camp in all my clothes. I am so itchy from all the bush bashing, hot, filthy, sweaty and my ankle hurts. I put a fire on to make tea for Abby and as we collapse for the afternoon tea ritual realise it’s nearly 5. That was 10 hours. 

Kakadu mixes serious walking in with serious resting. The next day we lounge in the shade, drink tea, play games, draw and I read an entire book. I love the little rituals of camp life. Collecting wood, tending fire, making tea and damper. We follow the shade around our sandy bank and make occasional runs across burning sand for the water. Over the days we camp here, the birds get used to our presence. The pied cormorant swims in the pool in front of us, then hangs it’s wings out to dry in a tree. A forest kingfisher perches in a tree above the campfire. Friar birds frolic in the rain forest patch behind camp and a bower bird serenades us with its horrendous squawk and a red goshawk chases a banded fruit dove over our heads. I think it got away as we didn’t hear any sounds of carnage.

The soles of my boots are falling off and my ankle still hurts, so the universal fix all of strapping tapeis applied to both. We take a day trip up stream, and it’s fascinating to see how the gorge has changed with the passage of 3 wet seasons since I was last here. Sand banks morph, pools grow and shrink. Baby vegetation sprouts and it’s incredible how any of them get a foothold in the few months before they are under a torrent of water. It’s the start of freshwater crocodile nesting season and we discover tracks and diggings where they have left the water to lay in the sand. Abby spies our first snake of the trip. Well, our second. I nearly trod on a tiny python, but it was dead. A pleasant change from the trip to the Kimberly where I nearly trod on 4 living snakes.

There’s a massive pool where our creek tumbles over wide falls at a convergence. It’s formed by the massive turmoil that must occur here as the 2 creeks collide in the wet. Swimming across it is a psychological feat. You know there is a 100m cliff between here and any person eating crocodiles, but it’s a deep, dark pool. I remember that walking across the top of it was a dire battle with rock and spinifex that took an hour to cover 100m. So we choose to boulder across. Shallow water soloing is kinda dumb, but it’s not hard and kinda fun. The we climb up beside the fall for a quick meander across the top, which has beautiful polished rock slabs spreading 50m wide. The first time I was here, we had set up camp opposite the falls and a group of school girls appear at the top and their guide made them throw their packs in and jump. It is the quickest way! The guide turned out to be a friend of a friend in Natimuk, in the way that Natimuk really is connected to everywhere.

My ankle is still not loving life, so we bailed on the final day walk and rest my ankle for the long slog out. See, I was sensible! It happens sometimes. Abby goes for an explore and I go back to serious resting. I’m ready to return to civilisation. We are day dreaming of Darwin markets full of tropical fruit and barra burgers at Cooinda. A cold pinot gris. Hot showers and our cosy vans. But also wondering what we’ll be able to do when we get out – will the NT be in lockdown too? Will we be able to travel home and where should we go if we have lockdown? Then a helicopter flies overhead and we conclude the NT can’t be in lockdown if scenic flights are on.

 After the heat of the day has passed, we decide to move camp a few kms downstream, to save time on our final day. Another perfect campsite is found, I continue my history of almost treading on snakes and scream as the tree snake dashes for the water. They really can swim as we watch it make the 20m crossing with ease. Abby gets up on a rock to get a better look and scares a freshy which also dives into the water. She hops in the water, then out again saying it was different when you actually see a crocodile in the water, even when you knew it wouldn’t eat you.

 

We make an early start which is soon lost to hunting for white throated honey eaters. Abby has been trying to find one for the whole time we’ve been up here, and she thinks she may have heard it. The bird app recording is played a few times to try and draw it out and we search around the rocky spinifex above the waterway which is its habitat. No joy. Then the creek disappears underground, coming out half way down the falls over the escarpment and joining the crocodile fest below.

We pick up the old walking trail down and I finally see a rainbow pitta in a rainforesty side creek.  We have a quick splash and wet our shirts in a shallow section of creek that looks relatively safe then it’s 5 km down the fireroad, a bash across a side creek where we were thankful for the feral pigs and buffalo clearing a track for us and then back over Jim Jim creek above the croc zone. We hit the road, hit the ground and put our thumbs out. No way were we walking the last 5k back to our vans.