The Global Guy

Well, I’m back from a six day trip out to the outback of the Top End of Australia. It was brilliant! We had about 9 people on the trip, and they were all great. I’ll try to summarize the trip here:

Day 1: Darwin to Litchfield national park. We went swimming in three different waterfall filled rockholes. Got to take a close look at some of the biggest termite mounds I’ve ever seen. These things are huge..maybe 2 meters tall, and shaped like a cathedral. Apparently they can grow for up to 70 years. I saw my first wild wallaby, and a bunch of other animals. At the end of the day we were taken to an aboriginal show where we supposedly saw "authentic" dances. This was the biggest crock of shit I’ve ever seen. It was so touristy and fake that I couldn’t keep from laughing. Their music was great, but the dances were just cheesy. At the end of it we talked to some of the performers, and they kept wanting to talk about American movies like "Terminator" and "Rambo".

Day 2: Took a cruise on the Mary river system down the rock hole billabong. Saw lots of birds, and a few crocs…both fresh and saltwater varieties. Afterwards we moved on to a site in Kakadu national park. We went to view the Ubirr rock art site, and saw some amazing scenery. Parts of Crocodile Dundee were filmed here, and it was great to recognize some places. There were lots of wallabies at camp, even some tame enough to pet and hand feed.

Day 3: We got up early and took a 4WD to go see Jim Jim falls. We went on a 5 hour hike to the top of the falls, and had a great time. It was hot hiking, and I went thru about three liters of water there and back. We found an amazing swimming hole that made the hike worth it. We got lucky because the next day they shut down the path to the falls for the season. When the rains come (we’re at the start of the wet season) the track gets too bogged down to make it safely there.

Day 4: Slept in a bit after our long hike the day before. We checked out the Nourlingie rock art site, and found more swimming spots. Some were absolutely gorgeous with lots of ferns and plant life all around. Another one was a lot of fun with lots of holes in the rocks that you could swim thru. The third one actually had a freshwater croc population in it, but we didn’t see any.

Day 5: Drove all morning to get to Katherine Gorge. We took a 5 hour canoe trip down the gorge and had a blast. My shoulders are still sore from all the paddling we did. That night we were treated to the most intense electrical storm I’d ever seen. We also had a great party that night to celebrate the last night of camping.

Day 6: Two more swimming holes…one at Katherine Springs and one at Edith Falls. Driving back to Darwin we saw a herd of wild buffalo on the side of the road. Pretty cool!

Anyway, I’m about to get on a plane to Alice Springs. I’ve got another camping trip booked around Ayers’ Rock, so I’ll update again when I get back from that.

Ok, it’s hot here…really hot. Actually it’s probably close to Houston heat, but I’m not used to it at all. There is a beautiful ocean right nearby, but no one can go in it due to the box jellyfish swarms that happen here about six months out of the year. Apparently while it is possible to die from a sting, you’ll just most likely wish you were dead. I’ve spent the morning booking a six day camping tour of the Kakadu national park and other highlights of the Northern Territory. I’ll leave on Monday morning, so I’ve got a day and a half to kill. Right now I think I’m going to go sit by the swimming pool and wait out the worst of the heat. All I need right now is a margarita and life could be very close to perfect.

Haggas’ Honking Holes is a tour company’s name for a great underground adventure trip. You start out in the town of Waitomo where you head for the company’s headquarters. After a quick test where you have to crawl thru a small tunnel to make sure you won’t get stuck underground, we all boarded a truck to head out to a local sheep farm (owned by a guy named Haggas) to find the cave entrance.

We started out at a changing room in a sheep barn where we were all issued wet suits, helmets, harnesses, and headlamps. We got a bit of instruction on rappelling safety, and then started hiking toward the cave entrance.

The cave started with a steep climb down to the first rappel, about 30 meters, the highest one in this cave. It followed a narrow waterfall, but it was not necessary to get wet, except for walking in the stream. Some sheep bones were found along the way. Sheep sometimes fall into the holes, and one guide said he once rescued one. The cave was beautifully decorated, with stalactites, stalagmites, flowstone, cave coral and soda straws everywhere. The guides warned not to touch the "pretty white stuff", the delicate formations common throughout the cave.

The second rappel was a wet one down a short but strong waterfall. Rappelling down a waterfall probably sounds like more fun than it is at the time, especially when you are directly inside the water. At the bottom, we had to find where the water was flowing, and follow it. This took me a minute. It turned out to be flowing through a low crawl-space. This passage, like some others we would come to, was so low I could not keep my face completely dry.

We slid down one waterfall, aided by a guide with a rope at the top. We got a close-up look at some glow worms. We saw soda straws a couple feet long. When we got to the deepest part of the cave, 65 meters below the surface, the stream went through a submerged passage, which the guide said could be passed by holding your breath for 30 seconds. We headed back up at that point via a different route.

We raced with our guide through one winding section, and stopped for hard toffee candy bars and lemonade. Then we came to a free climb, which was not too hard. I went first, and got the job of attaching the safety line to each person at the next big ladder, calling "up rope" to the guide at the top when they were ready to climb.

Then there was a series of tight climbs and crawls, where we followed a rope through a series of narrow passages with some steep parts. After more climbing, we emerged under the waterfall we first rappelled down. More ladders and climbs brought us to the exit, just over the hill from the entrance.

Unfortunately due to the extreme wet and rough conditions, I couldn’t bring my camera down with me, so the picture is stolen from a promotional brochure. Such is life!

After Molly left I headed up to Rotorua, a geothermic active area on the North Island. The first thing you notice when you get to town is the stink! The whole place has a sulfur smell that just overpowers everything. After a few hours you start to get used to it, but I can’t imagine actually living here. The first afternoon I wandered around town just checking it out. All the sewer grates had steam coming out of them, and every so often you’d see steam actually coming out of fissures in the ground.

The next day I went out to the Wai-O-Tapu thermal wonderland. It’s a park where there are tons of geysers, hot pools, mud lakes, and other geothermal features that you can walk around on boardwalks, keeping safely out of reach of the water. One of the most unique things in the park is called the Lady Knox Geyser. The geyser was discovered by prisoners in the early 1900s when they were on a work release program. They were planting trees nearby, and they found a hot pool that seemed ideal to wash their clothes in. A few minutes after they tossed some laundry soap in the pool with their clothes, the pool erupted nearly 20 meters high, spreading their clothes all over the area. Now, it’s understood that the detergents in the soap disrupt the surface tension of the underground water causing the geyser to erupt. Rangers at the park recreate this every morning at 9:15, and it’s quite a sight to see.

That afternoon after seeing the thermal area, I headed down to the Kaituna river to go white water rafting. The big draw here is the presence of the highest commercially rafted waterfall in the world. The seven meter (21 feet) Tutea falls is an amazing experience. Our guide was great at psyching everyone on the raft up about it, and the actual plunge was a rush. It only lasted less than a second or so, but the feeling of falling was intense! The whole trip was about an hour, but the water was so cold that any longer would have started to suck.

We’ve moved on to a place even farther north in NZ called the Bay of Islands. We took a bus up here for a very pleasant four hour ride, and then found a neat little coastal town to stay in. Went diving yesterday with one of the local outfits. Very cold water compared to the Caribbean diving I’m used to, but it was great to be back in the water again. I’m too far south to get any hard corals, but we saw lots of soft corals, eels, lobster, and other new types of fish I hadn’t seen anywhere else. On the way back the dive operators took us around the various islands, including the famous "Hole in the Rock" island.

The weather has been ranging all over the place. It’s been fairly warm during the day, but cold and rainy at night. I got my first good sunburn yesterday, but I think it’ll fade pretty fast.