Kakadu: another must do ticked off the list

Welcome to Kakadu embracing adventure style!

We'd been talking about Kakadu since driving into the NT and, certainly for me, it was a planned highlight of our Top End tour.

So I'm writing this blog post with a bit of uncertainty about how to portray the experience.

My thoughts yesterday afternoon as we wrapped up the main destinations were that it wasn't the national park spectacular I was expecting. But then I went through the photos and there are some beauties. So Kakadu is a big melting pot of mixed feelings.

First, the spectacular: the Aboriginal rock art at both Ubirr and Nourlangie was simply stunning. The sense of cultural and historical significance at both sites is profound, and having shapes that the children could interpret helped them appreciate the history of our country in a much more real sense.

Barramundi

A lightning spirit and a crocodile spirit

A hunting man

But then comes the tricky bit. Thanks largely to David Attenborough, I expected Kakadu to be an immense wetland filled to the brim with birds, wildlife and greenery. And I think it could well be in the wet season, but we arrived just at the start of the dry and what we saw was predominantly tall brown grass and immense amount of lands that had been freshly burnt by parks rangers as part of (necessary) fire control mechanisms.

Have a look at the photos below, there is some stunning scenery, but as is always the case, photos (like blogs!) tend to provide the highlights and not so much the average stuff passed along the way.

To be honest, we saw a greater variety of bird life in the little streams we crossed over driving on the highway from the NT border to Darwin than we did at Kakadu. 

The first water lily I saw was a very exciting moment

The sunset cruise we did on Yellow Waters was lovely, and our only real taste of a proper wetland, but again, mostly wildlife we had seen elsewhere.

Birds flying at sunset over Yellow Water Billabong

Egrets at Yellow Water

A beautiful reflected moment at Yellow
Water

A bush bike ride at Cooinda

Don't get me wrong, we still enjoyed ourselves, and we always find time for a good bike ride and bushwalk. It just wasn't the dazzling display of dramatic natural beauty I was hoping for. So, in conclusion, Dylan and Lukas have provided an average score of 5.5/10 and I have declared the only way to make a true assessment is to come back again in the wet season. The final verdict will have to await another adventure yet to come!

Max & Evie loving the crazy pandanus palms at Ubirr