Our explorers have now been to every state and Territory. What will they find in the Northern Territory?…

It is nearly the end of May and we have been on the road for seven months and are now in the Northern Territory, having travelled about three quarters of the way around this vast country. From the town of Katherine we headed north towards Darwin stopping off for a couple of nights at the small town of Adelaide River. It is from here that you can go on a river trip to see the jumping crocodiles. Tourist boats ply up and down the muddy waters and the crocs have learned to listen for them approaching as they know they will get a feed. Poles with rope attached and with large hunks of meat tied on are dangled over the side of the boat above the water. The crocs will then jump almost right out of the water to grab the meat. It’s quite a spectacle and makes you realise just how big and dangerous these animals are.

We arrived in Darwin on the 1st June and stayed for ten days. There is plenty to see and do there and we tried to fit in as much as we could. There is a very large night market at Mindil Beach where you can buy a wide variety of things and there are food stalls offering delights from almost every corner of the world. We tried a few of these and ended up watching the sun set over the ocean, very atmospheric.

The city of Darwin has been almost completely destroyed four times. Once by Japanese bombers during World War II and three times by cyclones. The most recent of these was Cyclone Tracy which occurred at night on Christmas Eve in 1974, when 71 people died and 80% of the city was destroyed. There is an exhibition in the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory where you can enter a room in the dark and witness what it sounded like to be in the middle of a category 4 cyclone. We did, and it was terrifying.

Darwin is also the jumping off point for a visit to Kakadu National Park. It really is a must visit place. Absolutely fabulous scenery and wildlife, and full of aboriginal historical sites and caves with cave paintings. It is also where a lot of the scenes in the movie Crocodile Dundee were filmed. There is a river here which is confusingly named Alligator River. Confusing because there are no alligators in Australia. The first English explorer into the area mistook crocodiles for alligators and named the river accordingly and the name has stuck. To get to Kakadu you have to pass through my absolute all time favourite place name in the whole of Australia, the small town of Humpty Doo. We stayed for three nights at a place called Jabiru in Kakadu National Park and on one of the days we went on a day trip with an aboriginal guide into Arnhem Land. This is a vast wilderness area of almost 100,000 square kilometres which is reserved solely for the traditional aboriginal owners and other people are not normally allowed to enter. It was a fascinating insight into their way of life, from the making of artifacts to the throwing of spears. Spears are thrown using a launching stick called a woomera. Using one they can throw a spear huge distances. I now realise why the town in South Australia where the British had their rocket launching test site in the 1950s is called Woomera.