After Kakadu we went to Darwin where we ended up staying for nearly two weeks.  We loved Darwin, even in October!  One of the first attractions we visited were the World War II Oil Storage Tunnels.  Darwin was bombed in 1942 during World War II.  There were more bombs dropped on Darwin that day than at Pearl Harbour months before.  Seven of the eleven above ground fuel storage tanks were destroyed during the initial and subsequent bombings.  They decided to create secret, hidden underground tunnels to hold the oil and fuel needed for their aircraft and ships.  Two of the tunnels are now open for tours, one you can only view but one you can walk the entire length of the tunnel. These large pipes in the entrance tunnel are ventilation shafts to evacuate fumes from the fuel. At the end of the entrance tunnel we found this cute junk man.  He was quite tall.  There were levers you could pull to make him move around a bit.  Next to him was the window into Tunnel 6. According to the sign Tunnel 6 is 77 metres long.  We couldn’t go inside this one, only admire it through the viewing window. These two tunnels were the only commercially used tunnels, used to store kerosene for aviation fuel in the 1950s.  But this tunnel imploded after heavy rains in 1955 and was decommissioned.  See all the water seepage? We moved on to Tunnel 5 which is 172 metres long so more than double the length of the other one. All down the length of this tunnel there are signs with information about the tunnels, the war, and life in the Top End at the time of the bombing.  The signs are new and are really well done.  The ruts going down the floor in the middle of the tunnel are to collect water seepage.  The tunnel was all stainless steel lined but the tunnels went without maintenance for thirty years and the floor of the tunnel had rusted.  You can see they’ve cut out the bottom so tourists could walk on the cement underneath. Here’s a picture of one of the above-ground storage tanks that was destroyed in the bombing.  There’s a person standing at the bottom of this picture, that gives you an idea of how big they were.  The last tank had only just been completed and filled five days before the bombing.  Nearly all of them were destroyed. We laughed at this picture of these military men holding a crocodile.  This one is actually quite a good size to be held like that!  We’ve learned that crocodiles are quite soft.  I wonder how many of them had seen one before being stationed in Darwin. The wrecks of six ‘flying boats’, Catalinas, still remain in Darwin Harbour.  A total of 33 were lost, half of them in the initial bombing. There’s a gorgeous timeline of Darwin’s history on the wall.  Look at the illustrations underneath, they’ve been cut out of a metal sheet with lights glowing through from behind. There were a total of 64 air raids in Darwin in 1942-43.  They started building the tunnels in 1943.  They were kept a secret from the public until 1992 when they opened for the 50th anniversary of the bombing. Would you believe the tunnels never stored oil?  Six tunnels were built at a cost way over budget and were never used as intended.  It was hot in there when we visited, I can barely imagine what it was like for the workers who built the tunnels, to do so in the heat and with a steam shovel adding humidity to the air.  And all in secret, too.  This was a very unique tourist attraction, something we’ll always remember about Darwin.

We spent our time in Kakadu near Cooinda and only stopped in Jabiru as we left the park.  We stopped at the Bowali Visitor Centre our last morning in Kakadu. Thankfully this visitor centre allows photography, so I did manage to get a few pictures.  We had debated not stopping here so we could get going to Darwin but I’m so glad we stopped in for just a quick visit.  This visitor centre was more about the land, the regions, the wildlife, while the one in Cooinda was about the aboriginal culture.  The two are very different from each other. Kakadu is a world heritage site, one of only 25 listed for both its environment and its cultural values.  It’s the largest national park in Australia.  It’s one-third the size of Tasmania.  It’s huge!  There are many different regions to the park and we really only visited a couple of them during our stay.  To get a better feel for Kakadu you need to spend more than a few nights here to take it all in. A 4WD is optimal to be able to see all the different regions, and be prepared to do some cruises or tours too.  It would be so neat to see this place during different seasons.  The wet season transforms Kakadu completely. In the visitor centre there was information on local wildlife with some great displays.  The kids all exclaimed over these flying foxes.  When I was a kid I remember being afraid of bats though any I remember seeing were tiny compared to these! They also loved the giant snake.  Of course.  What kid wouldn’t love a giant snake?  :)  We followed a school group in and I was hoping we’d get to listen to the ranger talking with them but they ran through here pretty quick and then disappeared. Cane toads were introduced to Australia at one point in the hopes they’d reduce the cane beetle population.  Instead they’ve turned out to be a terror to local wildlife (anything that eats a cane toad will die from the ingested poison) and they are about impossible to get rid of.  The kids are always on the lookout for one, we’ve seen some large toads, not quite as big as this one, but I have no idea if they were actually cane toads or not. We’ve seen many of these termite nests in the leaves as we’ve travelled around Australia, but this caught our eye because of the picture of the ants holding the leaves together.  We’d read they do this, but it was neat to see such a good picture of it (on the top right).  Some of the ants stretch their bodies and hold the leaves together while the others transfer larvae and glue the nest together.  We were lucky to see this in action not long after this, but I don’t remember where, I took a picture of it so hopefully I’ll come across it later. I didn’t know until we got to Kakadu and I saw pictures of the town of Jabiru that it is also the name of a bird, it’s on the signs going into town.  I’ve been hoping to see a Jabiru, they are rather large and elegant looking.  (I didn’t know it then but we would see one up close and personal once we got to WA.) Off in one corner was this kids fishing activity, this kept the kids occupied for some time.  They all had turns and helped TurboBug catch some things too. Any visitor centre that has a truck to climb into is going to be a hit with the kids.  🙂 This was an example of a cheeky yam, it’s huge!  We’d heard about these I think at the rock art talk we went to.  If the juice runs clear it’s safe to eat, if it has white specks in it then it’s too cheeky (poisonous) to eat!  The yam is the root of a foul-smelling flower, how somebody ever decided to dig one up and eat the root would be an interesting story. There’s a large uranium mine in Kakadu (not part of the national park but surrounded by it) and it was interesting to learn that aboriginals have long labelled the land ‘sickness country’.  These areas contain high levels of uranium.  We were interested in visiting the mine but were told there wasn’t much out there to see and it would have been a long drive.  About ten days later there was a bush fire in Kakadu and I heard on the radio of some controversy with the operators of the mine, some felt their mismanagement of the land was to blame.  I imagine there is lots of ongoing controversy having a uranium mine in the middle of a world heritage site! This room was closed off for maintenance but doesn’t it look lovely?  We didn’t get the chance to see any water or marine life while at Kakadu. This crocodile skeleton is begging to be climbed on and played with, I wasn’t sure if that was allowed and had quite the time convincing a 2yo to leave it be.  I was afraid he’d make off with some of those bones!  Look at that head, it’s huge!  There are more than 10,000 crocs in Kakadu, can you imagine meeting one of these? I had to tear TurboBug (2) away from the air-conditioned library with the kid-sized table and chairs.  Before we left we ducked into the theatre where they were showing the ABC documentary Kakadu: Where Man Meets Wild and Nature Calls the Shots.  How lovely it would have been to watch the whole series.  We sat enraptured and watched an aboriginal woman shooting magpie geese out of the sky, JitterBug (8) mentions bush tucker all the time after seeing that! The lovely painting in the picture below was near the toilets. We see these lovely whirly-winds quite regularly on our drives.  This one was after we left Kakadu that day.  Sometimes we’ll see leaves swirling on the road in front of us and suddenly realise we are about to drive right into one of these!  We can really feel it when we are towing but there’s no way to avoid them. I have more pictures of Kakadu from some other walks we did but they are on another computer at the moment, I’ll have to post them later.  We spent three or four nights there and then we were on our way to Darwin.  I was really looking forward to Darwin, to being in a ‘big’ city again and having a good rest after all the driving we’ve done since leaving the east coast.