After I had been to Litchfield and Kakadu, there was one more national park in the Top End for me to go to: Nitmiluk. Formerly called Katherine Gorge National Park, Nitmiluk is owned by the Jawoyn people, and jointly managed by the Jawoyn Association and the Parks and Wildlife Commission of the Northern Territory. The name Nitmiluk, according to Aboriginal legend, was given by Dreamtime creature Nabilil, who came to the entrance of a gorge and heard the 'nit nit nit' call of a cicada. The name means Cicada place. (Wikipedia gives the meaning as Cicada dreaming, but I would rather believe Nitmiluk Tours, the Jawoyn owned and operated tour company of the park.)
To reach Nitmiluk, I caught a Greyhound bus to Katherine and hired a car. I had looked at tours to the area, but all the tours I could find raced through, most of them being daytrips from Darwin. So I decided to become a so-called independent traveller.
Accommodation options in Katherine are pretty limited. It seems to be either camp at a caravan park or in the national park (if you have a car and camping gear) or pay $80 per night. Hardly a backpacker option. So of course I did neither and couchsurfed instead. My couchsurfing host was a fabulous woman and I had a great time.
There are two areas in the park that visitors usually go to: Leliyn or Edith Falls and Nitmiluk or Katherine Gorge. I decided to go to Leliyn first, as it was a good half-day trip, after which I could go south to Mataranka for the afternoon.
Leliyn is a word of the Jawoyn people and means frill-necked lizard. It is a river valley of red sandstone with several picturesque waterfalls. The frill of the lizard is the sandstone rising above the lower falls.
I climbed to the higher and therefore safer pool first. As in Kakadu, the waters were beautiful. The swimming hole is actually made up of two pools, connected by two shallow passages around a pile of red sandstone. By crawling over the shallowest and narrowest part, one could swim right around. I, however, preferred the pool with the waterfall. I had it all to myself for a good ten minutes. A few people came along to take photos with their phones, but they didn't jump in.
Then, as I was swimming around lazily, a man came up with an SLR. Something in the way he pointed the camera, then lowered it again immediately told me that he was a photographer spirit; not just there to snap a photo of a beautiful place he had been to, but to capture the perfect shot. And I was ruining it. I swam out of his shot and concealed myself behind a rock. Some minutes later I saw a thumbs up rising above the rock between us. I swam out and he raised his hand in thanks, then was on his way.
I walked back to the lower pool along the other side of the valley. The walk was only about 1 km, but it was hot, and by the time I got down, I was dripping with sweat again. The lower pool with its wide, flat river looked awfully like crocodile territory to me, but there were people swimming in it. Though nobody ventured very far out, I noticed. Not that staying close to shore would be protection against a hungry saltie, but I guess there was a feeling of safety in numbers. So much so that I changed back into my swimmers and washed the sweat off me before heading to Mataranka.
Mataranka is 110 km south from Katherine, unfortunately in the opposite direction to Leliyn. Mataranka could have been a day trip in itself, but I had limited time, so I opted to only go to Bitter Springs. They are advertised as 'hot' springs, but the water is not actually heated. It comes out of the ground at a pleasant 32°C, which is the ground temperature in those parts. Nevertheless, the water is warmer than, well, most places I've swum.
''You'll need a noodle and thongs," my host had said when I said I was going to Bitter Springs. She meant a foam swimming noodle, of course, to put under my arms to float down the gentle stream. Most people swim, but floating on a noodle is more relaxing and allows one to concentrate on staring into the crystal clear water, admiring the colours of the place, or on looking up at the green foliage curving over the stream and enjoying the peace.
"Put the thongs [flip flops] on your wrists when you float down," my host said. Bitter Springs is a one way swimming spot: there is a bit of a pool at the springs, where one gets into the water, and fifty metres down the stream some steps to get out and a little bridge over the stream to get back to the other side. The path back to the start is gravelly, so having thongs is definitely an advantage.
I ended up spending half my time on the little bridge looking at turtles. Little freshwater turtles lived on the side of the bridge away from the swimmers, but they were very shy. A German woman pointed them out to me, and I, like her, spent long stretches just waiting quietly on the bridge for the perfect shot. We had to wait until the swimmers had all cleared out and it had been quiet for five minutes. Then the turtles would swim around in plain sight. At the smallest splash from upstream they would skuttle away again.
A few impatient tourists with snorkelling gear swam under the bridge to have a look at the turtles. The poor creatures tried to hide themselves under fallen branches and in the darkness provided by floating algae. Once the tourists were gone, they didn't come out again for a long time.
The next morning I headed to Nitmiluk Gorge, another sandstone formation. Nitmiluk is actually a series of gorges, with a walking track up to the eighth gorge and canoeing possible - weather dependent - up to the ninth gorge. Going beyond the second gorge (walking) or third gorge (canoeing) requires an overnight trip.
What had been part of the experience at Kakadu became quite annoying at Nitmiluk: the heavy rain had closed the gorges to swimming and canoeing, due to the resulting strong currents and a risk of crocodiles. 2-hour boat cruises visiting 2 gorges were rather too expensive for my taste, costing as much as my full day tour to Litchfield. Therefore, I decided to walk instead.
The day was incredibly hot and the path was mostly exposed. At the first water tank I stopped, stripped off my shirt and ran it and my hat under the tap. It provided relief for about half an hour.
I had time for three lookouts. The tracks between them were mostly unremarkable, but the lookouts provided dramatic views over the first and second gorge. Beautiful as they were viewed from the top, I would have loved to have seen them from the water. I can't help thinking that I missed out on something spectacular.
Just before the second lookout there was a turnoff to the southern rockhole. After getting my view of the gorge, I went back for the rockhole. The path descended into a lovely shaded gully, and some way down it was a rockhole with a waterfall flowing into it. All the rain hadn't been enough to overflow the rockhole, so the water was rather dirty with leaves and algae. Nevertheless, as I went down, an Aussie man was just drying himself off.
I had assumed that all the swimming at Nitmiluk would be closed, so I hadn't brought my swimmers. Looking at that blessed water I regretted it. There was obviously no current - weak or strong - in this pool, and looking at the steep dry stony gully that must run into the first gorge during the wet season I voiced my thoughts aloud. "How would a croc even get here?" I asked.
"They can't," the Aussie man confirmed.
We chatted for a while, he emphatically told me to visit the Cutta Cutta Caves and I didn't have the heart to tell him I wouldn't have time. As soon as he disappeared up the gully, I stripped off. I hate walking in wet underwear (not that it would have been wet for very long in that heat), so I did what I thought was only reasonable and stripped naked. The cool water on my hot skin was one of the most wonderful experiences of my life.
I had been in the pool for about two minutes when I heard voices up the track. Too late to get dressed before they arrived, I decided to do what was only natural - pretend that skinny dipping in the middle of the day at a rather busy national park was normal. As the family of four - with two teenage boys - came closer, I almost laughed. Win! They were Germans. "Is the water nice?" the mum asked. "No crocs?" By the time I was getting dressed, she was skinny dipping.
I was hot within minutes of coming out of the shady gully, despite having dunked my shirt and hat in the pool. I overtook the Aussie man before the third lookout, Jedda's Rock; he was walking barefoot, with thongs in his pack for short nasty bits and boots in case an area was really stony. ''Training my feet for the summer," he offered by way of explanation when I marvelled at it. Some training ground he chose.
Jedda's Rock gives views of the second gorge. More spectacular than the first gorge, the views from Jedda's rock still don't seem like the best that Nitmiluk could offer. I could only imagine how awesome the gorge would look from the water. I had my lunch at the lookout and the Aussie man caught up to me there.
Ignoring the warning signs, the Aussie man climbed down onto a ledge to take a photo. He didn't fall the 100 metres down the precipice into the gorge and was on his way again before I'd finished lunching and admiring.
I overtook him again later. He had stopped and was looking at some rocks and I wondered if he was waiting for me. It seemed like he wanted to show me something. "There's an old beach just there," he said, pointing at a rock about a metre away. "See those ripples in the rock?" 100 million years ago the Australian inland was covered by a shallow inland sea. The sandy bottom of a body of water, maybe a river, at Nitmiluk had been covered by other sediments and had fossilised.
I had hoped to get up to Butterfly Gorge, but the heat defeated me. At the turnoff, all I could think about was aircon or a swim. The trudge back to Nitmiluk Visitor Centre was drudgery. I would like to say it was beautiful, but in reality it was 4 km of unremarkable scrub with unbearable heat and no shade. There was one hillock that yielded a 360° view of the bleak landscape away from the gorge.
When I got to the Visitor Centre, I went and stuck my head under a tap.
That evening I went to the Katherine Outback Experience show. It was one of those things that elicited a polite but unconvinced "if you're into that sort of thing" response from my host, the local. A local horsebreaker had decided to diversify his business by seeing if visitors were interested in coming to see his work. It was a good decision, as it turned out, because a five-year drought was bringing down stations and consequently other businesses in the area.
Tom, the horsebreaker, worked with an almost disappointingly calm colt for about half an hour, then had a trick horse pick up his hat and roll out his swag (bedroll) for him. He played a guitar and sang his own compositions from horseback, first sitting, then standing on his horse. He had a mechanical calf - real ones being too expensive to keep - to train horses in blocking cattle. The calf was a burley sack attached to a slider. Tom's partner made it slide back and forth on a wire, with the horse following, trying to make the calf change direction.
Tom, his partner and a helper brought out other animals, like a donkey, a mule and a buffalo with a calf. A bullock had decided to go walkabout and couldn't be found. He turned up later wandering around the lawn where Tom caught him. The bullock didn't like women, but let Tom catch and handle him without drama. There you go; sexist cattle.
The last part of the show was dog training. Tom had half a dozen dogs running around clockwise and anticlockwise, jumping back onto their allocated drums and herding goats. At the end, Tom's partner let out a puppy with an adorable instinct for working animals. Rather than rushing the goats, he stalked them like a lioness.
For dinner that night, my host and I went to the Savannah Bar & Restaurant to eat crocodile springrolls. When we had demolished our meals, my host said, "Not bad for two vegetarians." I had wanted to taste crocodile for the exotic value of it, but to me it tasted the same as any meat. Having been a vegetarian for almost eight years, with only a few exceptions on special occasions or under duress (there's nothing else available), meat tends to taste strange at best and make me sick at worst. Only very high quality and well prepared meat can make it into the 'delicious' category. Crocodile springrolls went into the 'ok but overpriced' category.
After dinner we watched a film called Beasts of No Nation, a film about child soldiers in an unspecified (imaginary) African country. My host, who knew something about the matter, said that the film was disturbingly realistic in its depictions. It was certainly no Hollywood. I recommend it, but the recommendation comes with trigger warnings about violence, war and (implied) child (sexual) abuse.
In the morning, I had just enough time to go to the Katherine Hot Springs before returning the car. Again, these springs do not pump out heated water. My morning swim was lovely and refreshing.
As so often, it was lovely people who made my trip to amazing places so memorable. The reason I remember Katherine with warmth is not because I enjoyed the Hot Springs but because my couchsurfing host made me feel so welcome. The reason Nitmiluk stays with me is not because of majestic gorges but thanks to the Aussie man and the German woman. And what I will always think of when I think back to Leliyn is not just the beautiful waterfall, but also the simple silent acknowledgement of thanks from a fellow photographer when I swam out of his perfect nature shot.
