Darwin and Litchfield National Park

We wonder what Charles Darwin would think of his namesake town. Damaged by Japanese bombing in WWII, then nearly destroyed by a cyclone in 1974, the rebuilt harbor town today is a touring and mining mecca of new condo towers and sprawling suburbs. If you've seen the recent Baz Luhrman movie Australia--most Australians haven't cared to--you'll recall the mythologized version of Darwin and the Japanese bombing run. (You may perhaps also recall  a shirtless Hugh Jackman.) Darwin is closer to Bali than it is to Sydney. Almost every day the local paper manages to find a story about a crocodile to put on the front page. ("A CROC WALKS INTO A BAR--NO, SERIOUSLY!"). Half the year, "The Wet," it storms every day, humidity is merciless, floods cut off the roads to anywhere. The other half of the year, "The Dry," it nevers rains at all, the heat gradually crawls from smothering toward baking, and the surrounding country turns back toward desert. This time of year, when the Wet has just ended and the Dry just begun, deliberate bushfires (well, mostly deliberate) burn off the seasonal grasses, which gave many of our drives an eerily apocalyptic feel as we drove through patches of smoke and flames that sometimes approached the highway from both sides.

Our favorite part of Darwin wasn't even in Darwin. It wasn't even a place so much as a pair of good people, our hosts at our B&B--Jan & Brian ("Greenie").

We ended up staying four nights at their place, in no small part because they were so relaxed and so generous with their time. They were always ready to give us a lift, show us around town, hand us a cold beer on a hot afternoon. And when Sarah wasn't feeling well, Jan brought over painkillers and cooked us a charming dinner that Greenie brought down on a tray. Great folks!

Eventually, we had to stop pestering Jan and Greenie, so we headed down to Litchfield National Park, renowned for its rockholes and waterfalls--and the absence of saltwater crocodiles, or "salties." We stayed in the quiet and strangely endearing little town of Batchelor on the edge of the park. Sitting in the town park on a Sunday afternoon, you wouldn't think anything much had ever happened here, but back in WWII, General MacArthur's bombing support flew out of an airport cut into the nearby bush, and thousands of armed service personnel were in the area. A decade after that, a uranium boom grabbed hold of the place, but today, it's a green spot visited mostly by 4x4s and campervans on their way into the nearby park. Half of the businesses in town feature the earlier name, "Rum Jungle," in their titles. No one seems to entirely agree on the origin of that prosodic nickname, but it seems to have something to do with a large supply of rum having been waylaid and/or spilled and/or consumed in the 1870s by a group of teamsters who stopped on their way through a thick part of the tropical bush. We stayed at the "Rum Jungle Bungalows," which is fun just to say aloud.

From Batchelor we rode into the park and walked the mostly short but seriously hot and humid trails to overlook various rockholes and waterfalls.

With all the early-Dry season bushfires working their way through the tall grasses in the park, the setting sun becomes a dull, glowering ochre ball that tempts you to stare at it through the smoke, the palms, and the eucalyptus.

The long stretches of road between the popular waterfall turnoffs were dominated by a landscape of scorched woodlands and thousands of giant termite mounds, including the striking "magnetic" termite mounds, blade-like towers oriented North-South in long files, a kind of living Stonehenge.