Searaven's Blog

Hi Everyone. Hope all are well.

We just returned from an amazing adventure at the ‘Top End’ of Australia. We flew in to Darwin, in the Northern Territory, where we met up with our friends, David and Elaine and their children, Anya and Callum. We spent the first night in a hotel in Darwin, then in the morning we picked up our four wheel drive vehicles and set out to explore Litchfield and Kakadu National Parks.

There’s so much to tell from the trip. The short story is, it was amazing. I’ll fill in the details over the next few days, but if you’re an armchair adventurer, or a well seasoned adventurer yourself, here’s a few photos and videos to whet your appetites. Hope you enjoy it, we sure did!

Here’s a slideshow with highlights of the trip.

Here’s the intrepid adventurer, herself, setting off on another grand adventure from Sydney airport.

Here’s our vehicle, above. A Nissan Patrol 4WD. This thing was a big beast, but it went very well off road and wasn’t too bad on the paved roads either. Only took a short while to get used to the manual transmission, shifting with my left hand, unlike the ones I’ve been used to most of my life. It has a tent attached to the top, though we didn’t use it. We opted instead for our 4 person tent that we’d brought with us.

One of the toys I’d brought along was a car launcher, with one purple and one green car. Well, Heathers favorite color is pink, and purple (yes, she has two favorites! ) and Callums favorite color appears to be green, so this toy worked out very well. They played very well together with it.

I love this picture of Heather, asleep in the tent, with her monkey. I took it one morning while waiting for her to wake up. I have a photo of me when I was little, asleep in my sleeping bag, in a tent, with my monkey, on a camping trip with my Mom and Dad.  : )  I hope that someday Heather takes a picture of her son or daughter asleep in a tent with their favorite stuffed animal.

In the picture above, the giant rock you see at the bottom of the falls, with people near the base of the rock, is still a ways away from the plunge pool of the waterfall. I climbed over the rock and down to the plunge pool, then swam for about 8 minutes to reach the base of the falls. There was a long ledge at the bottom of the falls, just above the water, standing on it you get lashed by the water falling 200 meters (660 feet). We were there at the beginning of the dry season, in about a month or so, the falls will totally dry up until the next wet season. In the wet season, the waterfall is so massive, you can’t get anywhere near this place. In the wet, you can only see this from the air.

The last full day of the trip, we broke the Fellowship, with Elaine, David and company heading to be enriched by ancient aboriginal paintings at Nourlangie and team Monkeys Uncle (us) heading on yet another waterfall excursion. It’s too bad that we didn’t get to Nourlangie, or Ubirr to view the paintings, but going to Jim Jim Falls was worth it. I’ll write more on it soon, but for now…