Bushwalking Tips for the Top End

Bushwalking: aka hiking. My interest lies with multi-day adventures. That means far enough from the road that you can't go back for beer and pizza, or ice cream for that matter, for days at a time.

“Top End”: the northern part of the Northern Territory of Australia. Say from around Katherine and north.

Having just spent a couple months exploring the Top End, much of which was spent walking, I thought I would gather up my thoughts on what it is like here.

Smitt Rock, Katherine Gorge

Weather

It is hot. Seriously hot. Even in winter. To be fair, no one here calls it “winter”. There are just three seasons in the Top End: The Dry, The Wet, and The Buildup. The Dry, June – September, brings cloudless skies every day for months, and is really hot with a relentless tropical sun beating down. The Wet promises frequent tropical downpours and electrical storms, with high humidity. I think it qualifies as “bloody hot”, although the storms do provide some short-lived relief. Then there is The Buildup, which is the 2-3 months before the Wet (~Oct – ~Dec). Apparently the Buildup is unbearably hot, humid, and still, with very little rain to cool things off. By all accounts, it unambiguously miserable, and can literally drive you mad.

17 Mile Falls

We were here in the early dry season, June – July, and it was beautiful and sunny every single day, with daytime temperatures generally in the 32-36C range. Throw an overnight pack on your back and start tramping across the savannah under a blistering tropical sun, and it will feel pretty darn toasty, even to a hypothyroid heat-lover like myself. By 2:00 in the afternoon, bare ground in the sun has been heated to the temperature of molten iron, and radiates an intense energy-sapping, hair-singing heat. The humidity was relatively low during our visit, so I just can't imagine doing much hiking outside of these two coldest months of the year. 

The Geography

The Top End is mostly pretty flat, and the attractions are typically either gorges (eg: Katherine), escarpments (Arnheim Land Escarpment), waterfalls and swimming holes (Jatbula Track), wetlands (Kakadu wetlands), or Aboriginal rock art (Kakadu). Save the rock art, the common theme is water, for a couple of reasons. One, it is bloody hot (see #1 above) and going more than a few hours without a swim is cruel and unusual. And two, the endless savannah (open eucalypt woodland) is of limited interest after a while – not to mention the oppressive heat and lack of water.

Katherine Gorge

All the whinging about the heat may have you thinking I hated the place; not true. While I actually like heat, I also like vigorous physical activity, and the weather in the Top End puts a severe limit on how vigorous your land-based activities can be, so that is a definite drawback (stingers and salties constrain your sea-based activities, but that is a topic for another blog post). But there are some truly stunning landscapes in the Top End, and I did find it a nice change to go camping and not have to worry about rain – ever.
There is something indescribably amazing about trudging miles across a scorching hot savannah and suddenly coming upon a spectacular waterfall of crystal-clear warm water cascading into a perfect swimming hole. The contrast makes the oasis of the creek oh so much sweeter.

The gorges are stunning. The grandeur of Katherine Gorge is best sampled from the cockpit of your kayak, but a three day walk up to Smitt Rock and Eight Gorge is a very worthy outing and is the only way to experience the place away from the maddening hordes of tourists paying $120/head to sit on their butts in a power boat while their guide's megaphone-amplified commentary echos down the gorge. A traversal of much smaller, but very pretty Umbrawarra Gorge, with the requisite swims across the big pools, is a lovely long day.

There are many, many road accessible waterfalls and swimming holes. They are typically very pretty and provide refreshing relief from the heat. But they are also typically packed full with hordes of folks with only limited use of their legs; their appeal pales in comparison to a 4-5 day traverse of Jatbula Track from Katherine Gorge to Edith Falls.

Kakadu Rock Art

Crocs

Two types of crocodiles are found in the Top End: Johnson River (colloquially know as freshwater or “freshies”) and estuarine (or “salties”). Both are common enough that you should assume they are present in any creek, river, or billabong, unless you know otherwise. The one, pretty safe loophole to that rule of thumb, is that Salties are only found in water that is navigable from the sea – although they will travel short distances over land, if you are above a significant escarpment, you're probably safe. Both are fascinating relics of the dinosaur age. Freshies typically grow to a couple metres in length, are harmless and very timid – you'll need to be very quiet to sneak up on one. Salties, however, are serious business. In the two years I've been in-country, someone seems to get “taken” by a saltwater croc about every few months. They can stay submerged for an hour, can leap far out of the water, and are masters of the stealth attack. They can grow to enormous size (6+ metres and 1000 kg). Given the slightest opportunity, a saltie over 2m won't hesitate to turn a human into a meal.

Saltie in the East Alligator River

There are many “crocodile management areas”, which basically means parks staff remove crocs from the waterways (trap, harpoon, shoot). This mostly seems to be abandoned in the Wet, and thus most swimming areas are closed from the beginning of the Wet until the Dry. Exactly when areas are opened for swimming depends on the year and park resources – in 2014, Katherine Gorge was opened in late May, with most other places opened by early June. It would suck to be here too early and not be able to swim. 

Tracks

The NT constitution prohibits the construction, or maintenance, of trails longer than 4 km. On any overnight walk, you will not get a manufactured trail bed. The “track” will be rough and loose, and the grass and other scratchy scrub will be head-high.

On the Motor Car - Kurrundi circuit in Kakadu

The only loophole is clause 13-b(i) in the legislation that permits the placing of widely-spaced, difficult to see track markers. So that is what Parks do. Small metal markers are hung from trees or mounted to metal stakes driven into the ground. Sometimes they are found relatively frequently (Jatbula, ~50m), and sometimes they are so far apart it is comical (Tabletop Track, up to 200m+). They can be very hard to see (how much contract can you expect from blue on white against an eternally blue sky?). Expect to spend significant time and energy searching for the next marker, that is typically obscured by grass/scrub/shade. We often found ourselves splitting up to cover more ground looking for a marker, and oftentimes, we had to resort to virtual grid searches.

On a good track, we'll typically do better than 4 km/hour; on the best the Top End has to offer, we were lucky to average 3 km/hr.

Pants

You'll be marching through nasty scrub most of time (see tip #4), so if you like your skin attached to your legs, you'll need to wear pants – gators just won't cut it. If you remember tip #1, adding pants into the equation really adds to your appreciation of the heat. The temptation to free the legs from their sweat-inducing bondage is almost overpowering, but don't: we met a couple on a 4-day walk who had walked in shorts only – and were a bloody (literally) mess by day three.

Insects

Surprisingly enough, I generally found the daytime bugs to be not too bad by Aussie standards – certainly some annoying flies at times, but even I couldn't get a really good whine going. As soon as the sun goes down however, the mossies are a force to be reckoned with – if you're not in your tent shortly after dark, prepare for a death by exsanguination. The only good news is that you won't suffer for long. Seriously, I have spent some time in Canada's north and thought I knew about mosquitoes; Kakadu taught me I knew nothing. Nothing.

And you can get scrub typhus in Litchfield National Park, which doesn't sound like a ton of fun.

17 Mile Creek on the Jatbula

Solitude

Maybe we were lucky (the Jatbula, for example, has a reputation for being fully booked out for months at a time), but once we were more than a few hundred metres from a road, we saw very few people. Since we generally prefer trees and roos to people, that is a good thing.

"Sandy  Camp"  on the Jatbula

Fat People with Pool Noodles

These would be obese “gray nomads”, suspended lifelessly in water holes by kid's foam “pool noodles”. They are found in virtually all caravan park pools, and swimming holes within 50m of a road. Parks interpretive signs suggest this is what they do as they wait for Happy Hour to arrive. They are everywhere.

I am not a word person

I was lying in the tent on the second night of our trip around the Tabletop Track, in the “Top End” of Australia, pretending the drone of mosquitoes, doing their best to push through the tent screen, bothered me not at all. As it so happens, I had just wrapped up, to channel my inner Brit, a rather uninspired attempt at some word puzzle. In response to my demonstration of an almost complete lack of knowledge of the English language, the wife asked me “Do you think you're smarter than me?” I, to my credit, fought off the ever-hungry male ego and resisting answering “Of course”. If I hadn't been feeling quite so knackered from our arduous tromping through the scrub that day, I would have responded with a question: “How do you define 'smart'?”

It is a question I have considered before: what does “smart” mean? You might be tempted to think of it like pornography: “you know it when you see it”. But I don't think it is so simple. Chou Lu recited pi to 67,890 decimal places. Some savants can do extraordinary mathematical calculations in their head. Remarkable as those feats are, does that make them as smart as Newton? Richard Feynman? An American teenager Tim Doner speaks more than 20 languages. Is he smarter than Marie Curie? Was Michelangelo smarter than Beethoven? All of those folks have accomplished feats that clearly required intelligence, but how does one compare them?

Compared to most people, I seem to find mathematics relatively easy. I did a Masters in physics, so I also do OK at physics. I am reasonably mechanical – I can figure out how most things work, and on occasion can even fix a broken piece of equipment.

Languages, however, are another matter altogether. On a few occasions over the years, I have taken a reasonable stab at learning French. Sadly, I have very little to show for my efforts. If you've got this far in this very first of blog posts, you're undoubtedly thinking I should have become fully proficient in English before attempting to add to my résumé, and I would have a hard time arguing that point.

Wife loves scrabble; I'd rather play chess. She can do crosswords for days at a time; I would rather put hot pins in my eyes. You see, my dearly beloved's question wasn't exactly apropos of nothing. While nine times out of ten, I can easily best a garden gnome in a battle of wits, she was suggesting that perhaps it might not be a bad idea to practice my language skills a bit, in the hopes of at least slowing their inevitable age-induced decline. Point taken.

But I am not a word person. Word games hold the attraction of a root canal. So my answer to fending off impending illiteracy is ... you got it, start a blog. I have no idea where this is going to go other than it is destined to be yet another self indulgent series of missives of interest only to the author's parents. And maybe not even them.