Going Walkabout

Well I can now reveal there’s a reason I’ve been feeling so irritable all week, because on Monday Darren abandoned us in this south east corner and flew up to Darwin. He’s gone walkabout with the chopperdocs so I’ve been coping with life in Sydney with nobody else to take out the bin ever since.

Of course, it’s not the sort of thing you want to broadcast, so I haven’t broadcast it until now because this morning Ella and I board the flying kangaroo to join him up in the Northern Territory, a four and a half hour cross-continent flight with only a portable DVD and a packet of Cadbury’s buttons standing between me and complete insanity.

Still, we’re very fortunate to have the opportunity to visit The Top End as they call it; a remote part of Australia that’s not usually high on the tourist agenda, at least partly because it’s incredibly hot and wet during the summer and some parts of the area get cut off completely when the roads are flooded.

The Northern Territory competes with Western Australia for the title of the continent’s most remote outback landscape, though unlike Western Australia, the Northern Territory is jam-packed with places of interest, places like Uluru (Ayers Rock) and King’s Canyon, Katherine Gorge and Kakadu National Park, the latter being one of the most stunning national parks in the country (and it's where they shot Crocodile Dundee, so once we’ve finished with Darwin, that’s where we’re heading).

Kakadu is also one of Australia’s four world heritage-listed sites, which is nothing to do with scenery and everything to do with importance of the habitat on a world scale. The others are Fraser Island, Ayer’s Rock and the Great Barrier Reef/Daintree rainforest, so once we’ve been to Kakadu, we’ve done the lot, three of them within the last three months.

Right then, wish me luck and we’ll be back next Sunday. I just hope he hasn’t been sent to Papua New Guinea when we get there.