I thought the world was supposed to look better in the morning?

It is a truth universally acknowledged that when you take a week off work you will instantly get sick. Such was my thought on Saturday morning as I sat drinking tea in my surprisingly-nice cabin to try to calm my swollen gland, sore throat and headache. This bug, characterised by the headache and a general feeling of being hungover even when you've had nothing to drink has been hanging around work and I keep getting patches of it off and on. Thus I was not the happiest puppy when, three cups of tea but sans breakfast, I met up with today's tour guide. Maybe this is why I didn't enjoy today so much. Still, I got to see Ubirr and that is the main thing.

To start things off, our taciturn guide Victor drove us around Jabiru: not quite the cultural tour I was expecting unless you find uranium mines and demountables fascinating. Then we spent way too long at the Bowali Visitor Centre where I obtained an apple for my breakfast. The Bowali Visitor Centre is very nice but not a patch on the Cultural Centre of the day before. Finally time for the trip to Ubirr, where the rock art is much older than Nourlangie. The paintings range from about 20,000 years ago up to the present day. Because the road is flooded this time of year, the tour company has set up a system of cars and boats to get us across the flooded part.

Photo: People fishing on the road to Ubirr.

What you can't see in this photo is the large croc trap just to the left, thankfully empty. This next photo is of the flooded road from the other side of the boat trip. The boat trip was very pleasant as the plain this time of year is completely submerged in water making it an eerie swamp-like landscape with the ever-present dragonflies that signal the dry is coming flitting everywhere.

Finally we made it to Ubirr and oh yeah, you know how I mentioned it was hot yesterday? Make it hotter today. Definitely 40 degrees, 90% humidity. We started climbing the escarpment at 11:30 and we were clambering up the exposed top at midday. Beautiful view though. The rock art itself was sheltered away from the elements, although a natural leak in one of the galleries has ruined some of them, as have vandals. There is, high on the rock, a painting of a thylacine now extinct everywhere, although extinct on the mainland several thousand years ago. The photo below is the amazing view offered from the top of Ubirr.

Now on the homeward run, we left Kakadu around 4pm and drove back to Darwin via the great view at "Windows on the Wetland" where we had a glass of wine and watched a very impressive storm roll in. Positively monsoonal, it was still raging when we got to Darwin and was very relaxing to watch from my balcony while I ate dinner and chilled.