travelling allrite

After a hot buffet breakfast we check out of the Kakadu Crocodile Hotel and drive back down towards the Cooinda Lodge. We have a booking for the Yellow Water Cruise at 11.30 AM. There are no shuttles down to the jetty, so we walk around the caravan park, keeping to the shade and away from the scorching sun. After signing the COVID documents, we climb aboard the flat bottomed aluminium boat. Everyone already aboard is sitting on the shady side and there is a definite list. Then the remaining tourists climb aboard and it is righted. The are families, grey nomads and a pair we dub the Instagram Couple with Mr Tattooed Fitness and Ms Makeup Flirty. Our guides are young Jeremy and grizzled Chiso. We slowly make our way out into the Home Billabong, then up the Yellow Water, named either for tannins in the water or for a carpet of yellow lilies destroyed by the introduced water buffalo. Along the way we pass the Dry Season docks of the cruises, walkways and pontoons submerged by the high wate...

It came to me that today was the first day since the pandemic started that I have visited another country. I needed no passport, crossed no seas, yet here I am in another land with its own culture and language. In fact I have crossed more than one land today. We head south along the Stuart Highway, then turn east on to the Arnhem Highway, past the wonderfully named Humpty Doo. What did Humpty do other than fall off the wall? The mango farms merge into the Adelaide River wetlands, the roadbed raised above the wet season floods. Lagoons of lilies and long reeds in which saltwater crocodiles probably lurk. Then it is back to savannah country. The country feels both dry and wet at the same time. Sometimes there are clumps of pandanus and paperbark, other times spear grass and woody trees. Boulders and termite mounds can be spotted. The road glitters in the sun, I guess from embedded polished quartz stones. We pass the green of the Kakadu Aurora Resort, closed except for the wallabies that ...