Tag Archives: Scenery

A Day in Litchfield National Park

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Friday 23 August 2024 – Our stay in Darwin was really more of a staging post between the Kimberley cruise and the next segment of our Australia trip, more of which later. However, we had a whole day here, and it was to be filled with an excursion to Litchfield National Park, about 100km south of Darwin. The tour was included in our formal itinerary, but entry tickets to the park were not. These are only available online, so we stumped up the AU$10 each before we set out. At no stage were we asked for evidence that we’d paid our dues, by the way. I don’t know how, or even if, it’s policed in any way.

Anyway, the itinerary included some interesting-looking items, such as seeing termite mounds, rivers and waterfalls, and some of less, OK no, interest – going for a dip by the rivers and waterfalls. It was billed as a “small group” tour, and turned out to be 17 people on a small bus

on a tour led by Emily.

The park was about a 90-minute drive, which included a coffee-and-loo stop

and travel through a countryside which showed some evidence of burning.

Much of the burning was intentional, programmatic and necessary, though there was some evidence of an incidental bush fire – nothing major, though, just some smoking undergrowth.

The indigenous people have developed a detailed understanding of the “right way” to go about burning the bush. Although not nomadic, they would move between seasonal locations, gathering food according to the location, weather and climate. Having harvested, they would burn the area before moving on; so when they returned later on, there was fresh growth breaking through to be harvested again. The controlled burning also removed much of the flammable detritus in the undergrowth so that lightning strike-induced fires were less likely to burn out of control.

On the topic of the indigenous peoples, one of the learnings for me of this trip is of the highly variegated nature of the indigenous cultural geography. Emily told us about the various indigenous peoples whose land we were travelling through, mentioning that the Australian land mass was actually split into some 250 countries, each with its own indigenous people. There’s a very good interactive map, which gives more details, but here’s the overview.

After a while, Emily swung off the road and parked up for our view of the two sorts of termite mounds on display. Termites split broadly into two types – wood-eating and grass-eating – and the first evidence we saw was of the work of grass-eating termites, and plenty of them, too.

If you view from an angle, you can see that each mound is actually a blade-like construction

and each blade is aligned north-south along Earth’s magnetic field. Hence, the termites are called Magnetic Termites.  In mounds built this way the termites receive the warmth of the sun on their eastern and western sides in the morning and evening while exposing less surface to the sun at midday when the nest might overheat.

Each mound belongs to a single queen, who pumps out eggs for several years; while she does this, worker termites are maintaining and growing each mound, the building work being visible as spikes of new material at the top.

When the queen dies, then that’s the end of the colony in that mound; vacated mounds can be distinguished by their lack of spikes.

Eventually, the mounds simply collapse and all the nutrients in their construction are returned to the earth.  What causes the collapse?  Mainly rain.  In the wet season, the fields which look so dry in the photos above can be covered in water, and it’s this which undermines the decaying mounds.

As well as the Magnetic Termite mounds, there were some of the more conventional style of mound, called cathedral mounds.  We had seen plenty of these as we drove along, but there were a couple of monsters at the site where we’d stopped.

Here’s the same thing, with people for scale.

Following the termite mound viewings were visits to three water features.  The first was the Florence Falls

which can be seen from a convenient viewpoint, and then visited by going down some 135 steps

and past the odd occasional sylvan scene.

I had formed a sort of half-hope that I might be able to take a photo of the falls without too many people in it, but it was clear, as we arrived, that this would be unlikely.

Sure, I could take a photo of the falls

but the wider picture was all full of people.

It seems that Australians are incapable of passing by a scene like this without throwing themselves in, something which requires too much faffing about to be of any interest to me. But it was a hot day, and I suppose it’s a way of cooling off.

In the trees surrounding the falls there were flying foxes – fruit bats.

And Jane captured a photo which demonstrates very clearly why Pandanus is sometimes called “screw pine”.

The second water feature, Buley Rockholes, was less dramatic

but equally crowded.

 

The third, Wangi Falls, was probably the most photogenic.

The other entertainment for the day was a “crocodile cruise”, on the Adelaide River. Having seen some crocodiles as we cruised the Kimberley, I guess I was expecting a quiet half-hour pottering up and down the river spotting crocodiles.  On the other hand, as we approached our cruise, there were signs for “Jumping Croc Tours” and similar, so I began to wonder if we would see something a bit more dynamic. I half-remember a crocodile cruise in the USA, about 30 years ago, where we were treated to the sight of a largish croc called Elvis leaping out of the water to catch bait dangled for him.

Our cruise leader was a chap called Rex

who ran a small and slightly ramshackle operation, but who was friendly, quite well-organised and knowledgeable.  He spent a reasonable amount of time explaining that we were dealing with saltwater crocodiles (“salties”), which are large, voracious and very, very dangerous – so no limbs or extremities outside the boat, or even camera lenses, as these could be the target of an attack. He pointed out that crocodiles, like sharks, have been unchanged by evolution over millions of years – in other words they are as good at their job as they could be, and that job involves stealth, aggression and voraciousness. We noted that Rex was wearing a gun.

After the preliminaries, we went off on to his boat –

– the smallest on the river, apparently, but still well-guarded with bars and solid steel mesh, only slightly bent, he told us, in encounters with salties  – and set off, with Rex telling us about the life of crocodiles on the Adelaide River.

Salties are very different from fresh water crocodiles (called, logically enough, “freshies”) – larger, much more aggressive and highly territorial.  We started off in the territorial waters of a large male called Sneaky.  Whilst we waited for him, there was the opportunity of capturing a couple of shots of local bird life.

It seemed the parrots weren’t too afraid of the hawk, though.

Rex attracted Sneaky to the boat using chunks of chicken dangled off a pole. A long pole. When he turned up, it was quite disconcerting to see how big he was and how evil he looked.

He was called Sneaky for a reason – he actually managed to snaffle the first piece of chicken whilst it was still underwater, but eventually Rex was able to get him to jump and take the bait. It was so swift and dramatic, that it was impossible adequately to capture by photo or video – for one chicken nugget he jumped so high that his head was higher than the roof of the boat; then he crashed against the side of the boat as he went down, which was really rather alarming.

Rex wasn’t just doing circus tricks; our time with him was quite educational as well as being disconcertingly dramatic. He introduced us to a female called Flicker, whom he also inveigled into taking bait, but he explained that she had to be cautious because Sneaky, the alpha male of the stretch of water, was still around.

We moved up the river into another male’s territory.  This one was called Gnasher. He’s a big bastard.

We also had a visit from a whole herd of Whistling Kites.

On the way back to his dock, Rex explained to us the import of territoriality. Any stretch will have an alpha male; alpha status is settled by fighting, if necessary to the death, and imposes a kind of order to the crocodile community. So when it was decided that there were too many crocodiles (for which, read: too many people killed in accidents) and it was decided to cull some of the alpha males, the result was actually carnage. Instead of making the river safer, it resulted in a whole series of fights as the remaining crocodiles established the new chomping order. It’s now reasonably accepted that culling is not a good idea, and the crocs are allowed to get on with life in their own way.

The crocs we saw today were much larger and more frightening than any others I had come across, and my respect for them has only increased.  It was an entertaining and educational hour or so we spent with Rex.

After that was just the journey back to the hotel and preparation for the morrow when, as I say, we embark on the next segment of our Australian trip. We will travel from Darwin to Adelaide; exactly how we go about this is something you’ll have to come back and read about another day.

Kimberley Day 8 – King George River

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Tuesday 20 August 2024 – Our final expedition, and also the longest – 2½ hours in a Zodiac.

It’s about 14km from the ship (X marks the spot) to the ultimate destination of the cruise – the King George Falls, which, in full spate, are reportedly magnificent. Dain had, though, set our expectations much lower. Since we’re well through the dry season, the water levels upriver of the falls were, unsurprisingly, low, so we weren’t going to see a massive cataract. Nonetheless, I wondered whether an aerial shot would be possible, even of a low flow, so I asked him whether it might be possible to whizz up the drone for a shot.  As soon as he heard the word “drone”, he simply said, “no”, and offered some kind of weaselly reason like migratory birds. I was expecting the answer no, so it wasn’t a surprise; and launching a drone from a Zodiac might have proved interesting anyway. But I’d have appreciated a more considered and les brusque response, frankly.

Anyhoo…

The ship ran a morning cruise for two groups and an afternoon one for the other two; and our group were last out, just after 2pm.  The first thing one has to do is to get from the ship to the mouth of the river, seen here between two sand spits, since we were just after low tide.

If you look carefully, you can just make out a Zodiac ahead of us as it enters the river proper.

When you enter the river, the scenery is pretty striking, with impressive cliffs on each side.

As ever, the dark patches are cyanobacteria. More on them later.

There’s a lot of geology going on, here.  For example, we passed a formation that showed we’d crossed a fault line, these arise where the Australian tectonic plate cracks under pressure from the neighbouring plates.

Left Bank
Right Bank

There were some amazing lumps of geology just lying around,

and one, nicknamed the “guillotine stone”, is very intriguing,

But it’s actually when you get up close that you get some even more fantastic sights. For example, our driver, Xander, spotted some very pale stone at the foot of a cliff

and took us over for a closer look

at what turns out to be very recently-exposed Wharton Sandstone. This – you remember, don’t you? I did tell you. Yes, I did – is the middle of the five layers of stone that make up the Kimberley, and is easily weathered; so what we were seeing had been uncovered by recent rock falls. These rock falls are catalysed by salt, which is present in the mists above the water; the salt water seeps into cracks in the rocks and evaporates forming salt crystals. The heat of the sun then causes the crystals to expand, putting pressure on the rock and over time this causes the rock to disintegrate. The honeycomb structures left by this salt weathering are called tafoni.

Further along the river we came across some much more weathered Wharton Sandstone, and the colours were extraordinary, as were the honeycomb patterns of the salt-provoked erosion.

Nature and coincidence between them also provided

a map of Africa! [ I don’t see Madagascar though – Ed ]

We did see some wildlife along the way.  There was an Osprey’s nest

though the bird on it is not an Osprey.  We’re pretty sure it’s a Peregrine Falcon.

There was a croc, a big bastard.

And there was a snake.

Xander (to whom congratulations are due for spotting the thing) swore it was some kind of Death Adder, one of the most venomous snakes in Australia (a high bar indeed). We’re not so sure.  Jane reckons it’s a Brown Tree Snake, which is not hugely venomous; our evidence is in the eyes, which show the “cat’s eye” vertical pupil. Apparently, the snake is also called a “cat snake” as a result.

There was a dolphin as well, and it apparently did some fairly serious cavorting, but not while I was watching, of course. A sea eagle flew across at one point as well, but I was busy trying to capture photos of something else. Ho, hum.

By this stage we were approaching our destination – the King George Falls. From a distance, it was a bit difficult to work out what was falls and what was just rock.

There are two falls, left and right, either side of the lumpy bit in the middle. We visited the right-hand one first.

The water flow was so reduced that it was more like condensation running down a wall than an actual flow of water.

but it did show up the rehydrated and therefore blue-green cyanobacteria at its base in very fine fashion.

Then we went to visit the other, left-hand fall.

The flow in this one was more generous – enough that, close up, one got wet from splattered water.

For the record, the falls can look magnificent when there’s enough water coming down the river, i.e. much earlier in the dry season than our visit – but of course then you can’t even get close.

image credit: donsmaps.com

Margie, the Cruise Director from APT, had laid on another surprise party for us at the Falls.

It was a nice thought, but actually dealing with glasses in a moving Zodiac whilst trying to take photos was a bit challenging. However, we manfully forced a glass of fizz down before heading back to the ship.

Although we had a full day left at sea before reaching Darwin, tonight featured a Gala Dinner, after the usual end-of-cruise ritual of introducing all of the crew to the passengers. There were in the order of 160 of us punters, and we were very well served by the 127 crew – hotel, catering, guiding, engineering and steering. Le Lapérouse is a comfortable ship, whose facilities are very well-organised and which has been extremely well run.  The social content surrounding the expeditions might not be to our taste, but it seemed to go down well with the other passengers, so APT have hit their niche pretty well with this cruise.

Overnight, we transit from Western Australia to the Northern Territory. This involves moving our clocks forward, as one would expect.  What I didn’t expect was that the time change was 1½ hours. We have a day at sea tomorrow, and should reach Darwin around 8pm, with the possibility that we could take a stroll round the town if we feel so inclined. Since we have a day or two there anyway, we may or may not take up on that. Come back soon to find out.

 

 

Kimberley Day 7 – Vansittart Bay

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Monday 19 August 2024 – Vansittart. Now, there’s a name to conjure with! Surprisingly, perhaps, it’s one that I had come across before. In the God Old Days when I used to cycle a lot because it was fun, before the appalling Surrey road surfaces put a stop to all that, one of my regular routes led through Windsor. Skirting round the edge, because I wanted to avoid the hill that leads up to the Castle, I actually used Vansittart Road as a way to get back towards the river.

The name Vansittart crops up here and there in British politics, so I don’t know the provenance of the Windsor road’s naming. But the Kimberley one was named after Nicholas Vansittart, 1st Baron Bexley, one of the longest-serving Chancellors of the Exchequer in British history (May 1812-December 1822). The bay’s name was conferred, like so many in this region, by Philip Parker King, an early explorer of the Australian and Patagonian coasts.

While I settled down to relax for the day, and try to be well for a putative medical checkup in the evening, Jane went off to the nearby Jar Island. Here she is to tell you about it.

Jar Island was named after the many broken jars found there, once used for storing and transporting trepangs, or sea cucumbers. Fishermen from Makassar in the southern Celebes (the present-day Indonesian province of Sulawesi) visited the northern Australian coast throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, negotiating fishing rights and interacting with the Aborigines. The processed trepang is prized in Chinese cooking for its texture and flavour-enhancing qualities and is used in Chinese medicine; the Makassan trepangers, after collecting and processing trepang in Australia, returned to Makassar to sell the product to Chinese traders.

However our objective on Jar Island was something far older…

The usual Zodiac to shore was followed by a short walk through familiarly rocky terrain,

and the familiar instruction to leave backpacks and hats (this time there was an actual hat-tree),

but the familiarity ended there: the art in this gallery was very different to that we had seen before. Formerly known as “Bradshaws” (after Joseph Bradshaw, who was the first European to see and record such art, in 1891), and now known as Gwion Gwion, these styles of representation are far older than the Wandjina art of our previous excursions – at least 17,000 years old. There is considerable uncertainty about who created them, where they came from,  and what connection there is, if any, to the Aboriginal communities who created the Wandjina art. This has become a political as well as anthropological issue; if the Aboriginal people are not the descendants of the Gwion Gwion artists, this has the potential to undermine native land title claims in the Kimberley. Lengthy discussion of all of this can be found in Wikipedia and a gallery of typical Gwion Gwion art can be found here.

A thought provoking excursion on many levels…

While Jane was away on Jar Island, I was resignedly reading the papers in my cabin, when there was a knock on the door and the ship’s doctor came in. I wonder whether the frustration I’d expressed to Lucille the evening before had provoked the visit; maybe it was just a visit he’d already planned. Anyway, he quickly took my temperature, which was normal (I’d taken some paracetamol), asked about a few other symptoms about which I only had to bend the truth slightly, and declared me fit.

I was no longer a number (cabin 524) – I was a free man!

This meant that I could join the afternoon expedition, which was a visit to a site on the Anjo Peninsula with an unusual geology and even stranger story.

It was another wet landing, on to a beach with some unusual shells littered about.

A short walk up a sand dune dotted with Spinifex grass

led to a very striking landscape,

a salt flat with some rocky outcrops dotted over it – really remarkable sight. The rocks themselves had a great variety of colours, and I could have spent quite some time exploring them,

but this was not what we had come to see. That was just beyond the salt flat.

There, among the scrub and trees, is the wreck of a Douglas C53 Skytrooper, a troop transport version of what we Brits know as the Douglas Dakota.  This one was being used during the second world war as a ferry plane to, well, ferry evacuees. Having done so, on 26th February 1942 it was supposed to fly from Perth to Darwin, with an interim landing at Broome. The pilot set out on the wrong course – wrong by some 20°* – an error only realised when it was too late to get to anywhere with an airfield before the fuel ran out. In casting around for somewhere to land, the pilot realised that Jar Island was too rocky, but then saw the salt flat and did a wheels-up crash landing across it, ending up where it can be seen today.

All aboard – pilot, co-pilot, flight engineer, radio engineer and a couple of military telegraphists – survived the crash. So did the radio, so they were able to describe where they landed, even though they didn’t actually know where they were.

Their rescue was remarkable, in that no-one knew they’d set off on the wrong course, so when they failed to turn up in Broome, all the searchers started looking in the wrong places, expecting, not unreasonably, to find crash sites en route to Broome. One person in a searching aircrew, though, recognised the description of the salt flat and so headed for the area, enabling the crew to be rescued. They had survived for a couple of days using pipes from the crashed aircraft to distill drinking water from seawater.

The crashed plane is a fine subject for photography,

and Jane had a private smile when gravely told that this engine, now detached from the wing,

was a Whitt and Pratney.

Nearby were a couple of interesting trees.  One was a paper bark tree,

which is a type of myrtle, apparently; and the other was a sizeable Boab Tree, though not anything like the monsters we saw in Madagascar.

It was surrounded by Pandanus (screw pines); someone had collected some of their pinecone-like fruits and left them in a small pile for people to admire.

Our group filed slowly back across the salt flat; I hung back as much as I could so that I might get a few aeroplane shots without punters in them, which meant that I was practically alone as I trudged strode back towards the re-embarkation point

where, to everyone’s delight, a surprise beach party had been sprung on us!

Champagne and cool jazz made for a fine end to an unusual and interesting excursion.

Tomorrow is a Big Day, in many ways. We’re coming towards the end of the cruise, so we get our passports back, and it’s the last day for any laundry to be done – these things are important, you know. There will also be the final Gala Dinner.

More importantly, it will see the final excursion of the cruise; scenically, we have been promised, outstandingly the best. Since I’m now allowed out, I can’t wait. But you’ll have to, I’m afraid.  Keep your eyes peeled for what I hope will be some really striking images!

 

* The pilot error may well not have been incompetence, but wartime tiredness compounded by bad luck. When plotting and then following a course, a correction has to be applied to compensate for the difference between magnetic north and true north, and this may have been forgotten. Also, the amount of iron ore in the ground can make compasses do strange things, so an error of this magnitude is not necessarily something to be dismissive about.