Day 182 | day at East Alligator River & Ubirr: just a day walking for a change
rest day
Ubirr is the major publicly accessible Aboriginal art site in Australia.
It’s one of the big 2 official attractions of Kakadu: the other is the Yellow Water wetland cruise. ($100: I missed that one.) You can do both from Darwin in a day.
There’s a huge number of paintings, going from the 20k-year-old hands on the ceiling type to the more recent Xray technique variety. There’s the Rainbow Serpent, a large distinct Thylacine, (a marsupial wolflike animal extinct in this region for more than 4000 years), plenty of fish and other animals and some spirits painted in what seems to be a completely inaccessible area, ie on a huge overhang 15 m in the air.
The art site is profound and fascinating but it doesn’t raise much attention with the tourists in comparison to seeing big feeding crocs float in on the surging tide up the East Alligator River.
Now that’s a sight to get the pulse racing as the primitive mostly submerged reptiles slash at big fish running with the rushing water.