A relaxed start to the morning after being kept awake until late by the partying group tour in the segregated part of the campground next door, followed by being roused early in the morning (before 6 am) by said group tourists being roused to get on their bus for a hard day being carried from swimming hole to swimming hole).
The road was good, the wind was fair (from the south if I remember as we headed west) and the hills were low. A few close passes from tour busses and caravans before a late morning break at the Aurora Kakadu Resort on the South Alligator River 42 km later from Jabiru. The river was wide, tidal and had more mud-skippers per square metre of mud bank than I have ever imagined.
Chris O’B was supposed to have tried to go on the river on an aboriginal guided tour but apparently the tour wasn’t running that day so ‘bad luck’. Chris had made an impression on the resort manager though but had gone by the time we arrived. After having an icecream, filling water bottles and getting out of the way of the hoards of primary school kids on excursion with their eagle-eyed teachers we were off.
Lunch was at the old ranger station at the north-west entrance to the park. Quite hot and we accepted a caravaner’s offer to fill our water bottles. He was surprised at how many litres we were able to extract from his tank into our bottles (between 20-30 litres between the three of us). Final camp was on the road fence firebreak at about 113 km from Jabiru.
We had just set up camp and were having dinner (tuna and pasta, what else?) when 3 or 4 Blackhawk helicopters flew past on the way to the Mount Bundy military training area.
We settled into bed listening to bursts of ever larger calibre machine gun fire from the military range seemingly only a kilometre away. First a poppy staccato (Steyr assault rifle), then a manly ‘burrrp’ (section 7.62 mm machine gun), then a slower choppier thudding (0.5 inch/13 mm heavy machine gun), then a seriously scary chunka – chunka – chunka – chunka (1 inch/30 mm chain gun?) and finally a heavy booma – booma – booma (40 mm auto cannon?).
The sounds of the heavier calibre guns would put any right thinking person off joining the military to get on the receiving end of any of them.
The helicopters then departed about 9 pm leaving us to sleep.