Kakadu Day 2

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We had an early start at 7:45am but not as early as the people at the Aurora at 7:15am. We had our yogurts and made hot drinks in the room. It had stopped raining overnight. Did I mention yesterday that it opened up and poured just in time for dinner last night? We were glad to have opted to eat at the Crocodile Hotel! It rained hard for at least a couple of hours. For reasons I am a bit unclear on, we had 2 small 18 passenger vans with luggage trailers this morning. I thought I understood the guide to say it was because of the dirt road we had to travel to get to this morning's nearly 2-hour, 4km walk to rock art at Nanguluwur. This was because the road to Ubirr, our originally scheduled activity, is flooded. So, our groups were divided in 2 in 2 buses and with 2 driver/guides. Ours drove us all out to the site and then asked who wanted to walk and who was opting out. Since opting out now meant sitting in mostly sun  on a hard wooden bench busy with insects of all kinds only 5 of us opted out. The 2nd bus came along maybe 20 minutes later and there were only about 7 -9 of them and we couldn't understand why there were so few and they all walked. Later when we got to our next stop at Bowali Visitors Centre we understood. Their guide had asked at the hotel and dropped the non-walkers here at a coffee shop with AC, shade, ceiling fans and restrooms and comfortable chairs and a museum for their 2 hour wait. How hard was that? Geez. So, as you might expect on the 2nd bus there were fewer walkers than non-walkers. The other improvement for that bus was that it brought them all the way to Darwin with an evidently really great guide/driver. We got moved to the back half of a half-day tour bus that was returning to Darwin in the afternoon. We stopped at Corroboree Park Tavern again, this time for lunch. We had hamburgers, chips and Coke Zero. Lunch was included. We set out again for Window on the Wetlands. We saw a lot of wallabies this afternoon. This stop was where our luggage was transferred and so were we after our visit there. We drove down to the Adelaide River afterwards for the Spectacular Jumping Crocodile Cruise. This place was very busy and backed up today as they were hosting a lot of ship's passengers and crew today from RCI's Voyager of the Seas. Good thing we had our Darwin touring out of the way! We had to drive through a buffalo farm in and out and saw a small wild crocodile out there. The last stop of the day was Fogg Dam. This was a really interesting stop.  The dam is the remnant of the Humpty Doo rice experiment. (This was all in place of this: This morning head off with your Driver Guide to explore the World Heritage Area of Ubirr, where you’ll climb up through the ancient Aboriginal rock art galleries, believed to be 20,000 years old, to the lookout for the view over the surrounding wetlands. Join the Guluyambi Cruise along the East Alligator River. An Aboriginal guide will provide an insight into their culture, including local mythology, the river’s abundant food chain, as well as bush survival skills. With special permission of the local people, you are able to go ashore in Arnhem Land. Visit Bowali Visitor Centre before returning to Darwin, where your short break concludes.) We arrived back in Darwin around 6pm and as the sun set we drove around over the next hour to all but one hotel and central depot before being dropped off ourselves, next to last couple.

We checked back into the Double Tree by Hilton Esplanade and got free cookies and wifi and a room on the HH floor. We got the room assignment before Clay offered his HH member number. Go figure. We went out on a quest for dinner. It was Friday night on Mitchell Street in Darwin and the Entertainment Centre is behind our hotel. There was a performance at 8pm and everywhere within walking distance was one packed, and 2 playing overwhelmingly loud music. We found this to a lesser extent on ANZAC Day too. Today though everything was actually open. So, we weren't able to eat until after 8pm. That is why I didn't get this typed up and posted until after breakfast today.

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