Day 61: Litchfield National Park & Adelaide River (March 9, 2011)

I now have an answer to the question: What is the weirdest thing I've eaten on this trip?  It's ants.  Definitely, ants.  Live green ants.  They taste like lemon.  I went back for seconds and thirds.  One of them didn't want to be eaten, though, and he stuck to my tongue for a minute or so, but I peeled him off and ate him too.

I bet the same person who discovered these taste like lemon also discovered you can make coffee from poop.

That was in Litchfield National Park, south of Darwin, where I took a tour for the day.  The most famous park in the area is Kakadu National Park, but it's about 3 hours away from Darwin and to really see it, you need three days and several hundred dollars.  Litchfield, on the other hand, is closer, smaller and cheaper, and is very similar (but doesn't have aboriginal cave paintings).  So since time and money are scarce, I went to Litchfield.

Merry, merry king of the bush is he.

Our tour started at 7am and the first stop was on the way to the Park at the Adelaide River, where we took a boat tour in search of crocodiles.  We saw several, and coaxed by raw meat dangling from a wire, they would follow the boat and would jump out of the water to catch the meat.  Our guides, Reuben and Adam, would snatch it away several times, but would eventually let the croc have the meat.  That was pretty fun.  Crocodiles are pretty scary though; they just stare at you with these glassy eyes.  And they can sneak up on prey and before you know it, you're eaten.  On our way back to town at the end of the tour, the guides told us all these stories about being getting eaten by crocodiles.  Of course they didn't tell us these stories on the way to the crocs.

Litchfield is very pretty.  A lot of it is just forest, like you'd see anywhere only with different trees.  Its outstanding features are its termite mounds and waterfalls.  This part of Australia is approaching the end of the rainy season, so all the rivers are swollen.  And aparently there has been record rainfall this season (which still has more than a month to go!) so all of the rivers are extra swollen.  (Note to self:  Try to find out if the extra rain in Sri Lanka is related to the extra rain in Australia.)  So sometimes these waterfalls are more like a trickle, but they were pretty spectacular today.

A cathedral termite mound.

A magnetic termite mound.  They line up perfectly north-south.

Have I mentioned it's pretty warm here?  It is, and the really high humidity makes it feel much worse than it actually is.  So going for a dip in one of the rivers was great.  The water was super clean and clear (we could drink it) and while it had a few fish in it, they mostly hung out near the bank, so I could swim without being creeped out.  I realized today, I don't think I've ever swum in a river before.  I've played in rivers (small ones) and spent several days tubing down a river, with the help of the tube, of course.  But I never had to propel myself through a stream.  It was a little scary for a moment when I realized that by swimming at my usual pace, I was only keeping pace with the current, and couldn't move upriver!  But by moving towards a bank and kicking it up a notch, I was able to move upstream.  I can see how people get swept away in rivers, though -- an even slightly stronger current might have been too much for me to swim against, let alone weaker swimmers.

I seem to have lost my suntan.

We finished the day with champagne while watching the sunset over Darwin Bay.  That was the day.  I got back to the hotel around 7:30, completely exhausted, then answered some emails, uploaded my photos, wrote this post, and now I'm going to bed.  I head to Alice Springs tomorrow, where I'll spend about one day and then (assuming I find a suitable tour) will head to Ayers Rock for a few days.  G'night!