Apologies, dear reader, for the extended delay. I can just about imagine you, every morning waking up and hoping that’ll be the morning you get that magical email, a new dispatch from your not-that-faithful correspondent. While life isn’t about making excuses, this time there’s a slightly more solid reason than “I’ve been extremely lazy”. It’s been an up and down couple of weeks…

I had a marvelous time in far west Queensland, with lots of free camps, incredible stars, and red dirt galore. I felt like I was finally starting to see the things that had attracted me to Australia in the first place, these incredible desert landscapes. As I was driving through I felt a powerful urge to just wander around the bush, and I got to do just that on a couple of occasions, which was as beautiful and satisfying as I’d hoped.

There were a couple of notable highlights in the western part of Queensland. The first was Fountain Springs, a picturesque natural pool fed by a bubbling underground spring that I stumbled upon at the end of a 20km dirt road through various abandoned mining towns. It’s an absolutely stunning spot, with huge cliffs split in the middle by a seasonal waterfall as the backdrop for the pool. I spent the night there, watching the sun set at the pool and generally loving life.

The next day I went and checked out the Mary Kathleen abandoned uranium mine, which is a pretty psychedelic vista, and not just because of radiation poisoning. It’s a huge open cut mine, the bottom of which is filled with turquoise water, looking somehow almost fluorescent for some reason… It’s really a beautiful view. This was one of the chances I took to wander around the bush—I walked up and around the mine to the high side, and then just kept going until I finally reached the ridge with a view to the other side. I really, really enjoyed this walk. There was no real trail (don’t worry, I had my trusty offline maps, GPS watch, and satellite communicator) so I just picked my way, following cattle and kangaroo trails, just walking upwards towards the ridge. The views were incredible—huge vistas of shrubby desert with rocky hills and buttes sticking up here and there. I had flashbacks to times wandering around the desert in Southern California, one of my favorite things. On the way back I went out on one of the levels of the mine at the high side, sat on a huge boulder, and just took it all in. This was a good day.

After that there was nothing left to do but cross into the Northern Territory. which is actually the whole top half of the middle third of the country. The NT is an interesting place. It’s not actually a state, for reasons that escape me. It has a substantial aboriginal population, with many people still living in their ancestral lands, and many others living in poverty and dealing with high rates of homelessness, alcoholism, and domestic abuse. The older generations are trying to preserve their culture (the oldest continuous human culture in the world!), and the younger generations are caught between two very different ways of life. It’s a complicated situation and I am, frankly, quite ignorant on the matter, but it certainly seems to me like a conundrum without any really good solutions. It also made me reflect a bit on my own heritage in the US, the terrible conditions that most Native Americans still face, and how ignorant I am on that matter as well.

My plan had originally been to make tracks to WA, with a quick detour up to Darwin, but skipping the “red center” of the country, whose main attraction is Uluru, the giant sandstone monolith sticking out of the desert. When a friend told me that Alice Springs, the main town in the red center, was only a 5 hour detour, I decided it was worth it to go check it out. Several people warned me that Alice Springs has a very high crime rate (I think the highest in the country), with lots of break-ins, so my plan was to stop in, get some information from the visitor center, and then head to a campground outside of town to marinate in the incredible landscapes. Unfortunately, in the hour I hung around the visitor center between 3 and 4 in the afternoon, the titular robbers smashed my passenger window and grabbed my two backpacks, which I had conveniently packed up for them with absolutely all of my valuables. I ended up getting back some of the stuff they ditched (notably my passports, which was huge), but losses included my laptop, camera, satellite communicator, GPS watch, headphones, kindle, binoculars, and pretty much all my hiking stuff.

This was a huge bummer. As many of you have picked up on, my time in Australia has been a bit challenging. When I headed down to Alice Springs I was just starting to feel like I was really hitting my stride. I’d had an amazing time once I got inland in Queensland, I was very excited to check out the red center, and I was looking forward to the tropics of the Top End. It felt like things were finally lining up, and so this obviously brought me crashing down to earth. While this was a considerable financial blow, I’m in the very lucky position to be able to absorb it. The emotional blow, on the other hand, was harder to swallow. I couldn’t stop thinking about all the things I could have done differently, parked somewhere else, not hung around the visitor center for so long, spread my stuff out in a bunch of nooks and crannies, etc… I couldn’t stop asking myself what I was even doing here in Australia. I didn’t feel comfortable parking my van literally anywhere for any amount of time—besides robberies, there are apparently also many cases of auto theft, which would have been pretty debilitating given that everything I own is in the van. And I lost all of the photos I’d been having such a good time taking on my camera since the beginning of February, covering many of the highlights from my time in New Zealand and all of my time in Australia.

There were a couple of silver linings though. At my campground that night I met a couple of really nice guys who had also been broken into and we enjoyed some misery bonding, which honestly lifted my spirits immensely. Cheyne, the guy I’d couchsurfed with in Sunshine Coast, actually lives part time in Alice Springs and turned out to be in town, and he graciously let me once again park in his driveway, use his shower, and enjoy his company. We had a fun night at a brewery with a handful of nice travelers from the campground, and that fun night was capped off with the news that I’d be getting my passports back.

After that it was basically just a question of soldiering on and doing my best to enjoy it. I spent one day driving out along the West MacDonnell range, with stops at Standley Chasm and Ormiston Gorge, both beautiful. Then I went and checked out Kings Canyon, 5 hours southwest of Alice Springs. It’s an incredible place, with a deep gorge carved out of the sandstone, and an otherworldly topography of miniature domes on top, formed by cracks in the sandstone and subsequent erosion. I wish I’d been able to enjoy these spots more, but to be honest it was a deliberate effort to be present and to have a good time. There were a lot of reminders of my missing stuff, like the fact that I didn’t feel comfortable doing the hike I wanted to because I didn’t have any of my hiking safety gear, and of course my missing camera.

The camera, and the photos I lost, really hit me hard. It’s been a solitary several months and my old high school pursuit of photography has become one of my main activities. I’ve been really enjoying the act of photography itself, I’m honestly proud of many of the images I was able to capture, and I was excited about having these beautiful reminders of all the places I’ve been (all the more given my aphantasia). The camera I can replace, but I feel a real sense of loss for the photos.

Given how I was feeling, the fact that Uluru is another several hours from Kings Canyon, and my suspicion that just standing and looking at it with several tour buses full of my new closest friends wouldn’t really light up my life, I decided it was time to just cut my losses in the red center and head north. I made it up to Darwin in a few days, and with some much needed and appreciated encouragement from my friend Liz, set about just biting the bullet and replacing all my stuff. She rightly pointed out that, while things are expensive in Australia, it was worth it to just replace everything and then enjoy the rest of my time instead of trying to do without and then just feeling bad every time I was confronted by something I was missing. It was quite a shopping spree, and frankly it did make me feel better.

Darwin is the main city in what Australians call the Top End, which is the tropical northern part of the NT. Being that this is the tropics there is a wet and a dry season (the aboriginal people actually recognize 6 seasons with various finer grained aspects of temperature, humidity, storms, etc…, which are important for determining when to back burn, what to hunt or forage, when to perform ceremonies, and other aspects of life), and the landscape completely changes between the two. It’s the dry season right now, meaning that waterfalls trickle but roads are not flooded, so all in all a good time for me to be here.

After a couple of days in Darwin I went for a day in Litchfield National Park, about an hour southwest of the city. It’s pretty much a sequence of beautiful waterfalls with accompanying plunge pools, and people around here seem to use it as a natural waterpark. The scenery is stunning, but I have to admit that the large crowds of families and retired folks with pool noodles in the water, while comical, put me off a little bit. Litchfield is also home to a couple of notable termite populations. The cathedral mounds are just insanely huge—they can be over 10 feet tall. There are also the magnetic termites, who align their mounds north-south so that there’s always a shady side for them to cool down (they’re completely blind, and scientists confirmed their magnetic sense by putting some in a magnetic field and seeing that they built their mound aligned with it). The field full of perfectly aligned termite mounds is eerily reminiscent of a cemetery. That night I stayed at an absolutely incredible free camp right next to a burbling stream, with a short walk up to a trickling waterfall. It was a full moon, and once I got over my fear of the incredible amount of noise a frog can make jumping around on dry leaves I walked up to look at the waterfall by moonlight. I was the only one there and it was really just a staggeringly beautiful sight. I missed my bedtime that night but I did feel better about what I’m doing here in Australia.

Next up was Kakadu National Park, the largest park in Australia. With how long this post is I’m running out of adjectives, but this was really the top of the top. One of the main features of the park is that it covers an entire river system along with its extensive floodplain. Right now, in the dry season, the rivers look like what you’d expect. In the wet season the water level can rise 15 feet or more, leaving enormous swathes of the park underwater. Even dry, the gigantic floodplains are quite a sight to behold, and the wildlife here is abundant. The stars of the show are certainly the estuarine, commonly called saltwater, crocodiles. Estuarine is a better term because they’re actually perfectly happy in fresh water. Anyway, these are the ones you think of when you think of Australia, the crocodile hunter, and all that jazz. They can grow to be 20 feet long, live up to around 100 years, and eat absolutely anything that moves. They’re the reason you can’t swim in the ocean or in any rivers anywhere around here, unless the spot has specifically been cleared of them. They were hunted nearly to extinction but since gaining protected status their numbers have exploded, and their population is estimated around 150,000 now in the Northern Territory. They are really impressive and beautiful animals (you can see some of their different colorings in the photos), and the park features an incredible place to get a look at them.

Cahills Crossing is a causeway crossing the East Alligator River (the rivers in the park are named alligator because British explorers were stupid), the middle of which is a little bit underwater. It’s close enough to the ocean that at high tide the water pushes inland against the river, and the fish take the chance to cross the causeway. This sets up a scene similar to grizzly bears at a salmon run, with something like 30-40 crocs lining up for their chance to munch on some shockingly large fish. It’s… wild. You can hear the loud snapping of either crocodile jaws or fish bones, I’m not sure which. You can see how terrifyingly fast a crocodile can move when sufficiently motivated. You realize it’s not a joke that a crocodile completely disappears the moment it goes under the water. I had a hell of a time.

After Cahills Crossing I went to check out the incredible rock art gallery at Ubirr. The art ranges from more than 6,000 years old up to the 60s and features creation stories, spirits, and detailed drawings of various animals. It’s beautiful and the stories are fascinating. The area itself is also stunning, huge piles of sandstone sticking up out of the floodplain and monsoon forest. I got more acquainted with the variety of ecosystems in the park on the Barrk sandstone walk, a 12km loop through forest and all kinds of beautiful sandstone formations, with huge views at various points. The next day I went for the sunrise cruise on the Yellow Water Billabong, which stays wet all year round. The main attraction here is the incredible variety of bird life (though there are still lots and lots of crocs) and the views of floodplain all around, and it was a tremendous experience.

And that’s pretty much that. I’m back in Darwin now, running errands and stocking up for the next part of the circuit. Tomorrow or the day after I’ll be heading to Nitmiluk (Katherine) Gorge for a day or two of swimming and waterfalls, and then it’ll be full steam ahead for WA. I’ve got my stuff (including a zoom lens that’s twice as powerful, which is huge), I had a tremendous time in Kakadu, and I’m feeling good about what comes next. I’m including a map here to give you a rough idea of the geography involved here—blue dots are the places I’ve already been, and purple is what comes next. You can also see a couple of videos for this post here. Assuming I don’t manage to misplace this laptop you should hear from me again before too long.