Northern Territory Escape, Days 6 and 7

Well, here it is, the last couple of days...I hope you enjoyed the trip.

Day 6:

The last full day of our trip and we were on our way to the Northern Territory Wildlife Park and then to Litchfield National Park.

The Wildlife Park was absolutely wonderful, unfortunately we only had two hours there and I think two days wouldn’t have been enough time to see everything. There were 6 km of road within the park and little trains that picked people up and dropped them off at stations throughout the park. We only had time to see the aquarium and aviary. But that was a great experience.

We would have liked to have seen the nocturnal animals and I wanted to see the snakes. But in the aviary I was able to see birds I had only heard about through work I was doing at that time...striated pardalote, bar-shouldered dove, hooded parrot, varied lorikeet, emerald dove, spangled drongos, crakes, rails, curlews and a female black cockatoo to name but a few.

We had lunch at a place called Wongi Falls which we travelled to via a back road – a corrugated and winding red dust road that had me feeling rather queasy by the time we got there. So we went for a walk to the falls and once I’d been in the fresh air for a little, I felt heaps better and was able to face lunch. The falls were beautiful and people were swimming and sharing the pool below the falls with black bream and archer fish. We had lunch under the trees and while we were eating, a blue kookaburra flew down and posed on a branch for us.

We headed for Florence falls after lunch were people were also swimming. I’m afraid it was not warm enough for me!

The next stop was to have a look at some magnetic termite mounds (built north-south), but by this time I’d had enough and was not getting off that coach. I was ready to go home. This was the last full day of our trip and I couldn’t wait to sleep in my own bed.

So we arrived back in Darwin about 4.30 pm, showered and changed and went down to the Jabiru Bar for happy hour and crab races. Unfortunately, no-one told the crabs what they were supposed to be doing and it was a bit of a fizzer. Happy hour was good though, several of the tour group met up and we all got a bit happy and noisy before dinner.

I was keen to go for a walk after dinner as Mum and Harold had overindulged just a trifle and I thought a walk in the balmy tropical night air would do them good. There was a mini market around the corner from the hotel so we wandered up there. Got some pretty gold and amethyst earrings for Suzie. Apart from that, the market was very mini! Mum was tired so Harold took her back to the hotel, I followed about 15 minutes later. Home tomorrow!

320 km

Day 7:

Didn’t wake up until 7.00 am – sleep in! We didn’t have to be out of the hotel until 10.00 am so we wondered down for a leisurely breakfast then packed our bags and ambled down to the Mall. I found a nice shorts and top set for $30, had an orange and mango juice and could really taste the mango. Food was expensive in the Northern Territory because it all had to be freighted up from the south by road train. Not a hell of a lot grows in the Northern Territory apart from the ubiquitous palm trees of various types, cycads, frangipani, bougainvillea and bloody big mango trees! Of course, there were all the eucalypts as well.

It was time for us to head out to the airport for the four hour flight back to Brisbane. I was looking forward to seeing the inflight movie, ‘The Mummy” but the video had packed up.

Total km travelled in 6 days 1,651.