What is it about the Aussies where they feel the need to shorten names and then add an “O” to the end of them?
On my second day in Kakadu National Park I went on an excellent tour to Gunlom Falls.
My guide was called Damian. Or “Damo”. Everyone called him Damo. He called me Hayles instead of Hayley, which people sometimes do and I don’t mind at all. It seems like it’s an Aussie obsession to try and shorten a perfectly good name.
Anyway my day trip to the Gunlom Falls with Spirit of Kakadu was wonderful. I had a hire car, but there are so many car accidents in the Northern Territory involving tourists in hire cars that they have a lot of restrictions. One of them is that unless you have hired a 4WD, which is horrendously expensive in the Northern Territory, you can’t drive on any unsealed roads at all. Even if you hire a 4WD some roads are still off limits they’re so horrendous, including the one to Jim Jim Falls which even Kakadu Tours and Travel don’t offer because the roads are too horrendous for the guides to drive. Surely if the roads are so bad that even the local tour companies won’t go down them, they should do something to improve them.
I wasn’t going to Jim Jim, I was going to Gunlom, another place featured in Crocodile Dundee, at the very end of the Australian part of the film where they go swimming. The film is full of inaccuracies and downright lies, do not come to Kakadu relying on anything in that film. So for instance, Crocodile Dundee says that the lake at Gunlom Falls is safe to swim in because the crocs won’t go near mineral water. It’s total rubbish! In fact, the bottom pool at Gunlom is teeming with crocodiles. More about that later.
Gunlom Falls was supposed to be amazing which was the reason I had opted to do a tour rather than miss it completely or spend hundreds of pounds hiring a 4WD to drive there myself. And I was not disappointed. If I’d been impressed with the tour yesterday, Gunlom Falls far surpassed it.
We made a brief stop at the termite mounds which were basically the same as I’d seen in Lichfield. Damo told me he hated guides who stuck keys and suchlike into the termite mounds to illustrate how termites repaired their mounds. If enough guides do that the termites can’t repair their mounds quickly enough, the ants get in and eat the termites. The other guide Tim then proceeded to do exactly that! Damo said they were ego tour guides who were the worst kind.
The road to Gunlom was horrible! Damo said I’d be pleased I hadn’t driven it myself and he was right. It was a rutted, corrugated, 37km nightmare. It was definitely as bad as some of the worst roads I’d driven on in South Australia. It was difficult to tell when I wasn’t driving if all 37km was completely ghastly, when he was flying over it at least 3 times as fast as I’d driven the really bad roads in South Australia, but 37km at 20kph would not have been fun.
Despite there being a total ban on hire cars going on gravel roads in the Northern Territory, there were plenty of tourists prepared to flout this rule and we passed a lot that were illegally driving down the road to Gunlom. The vehicles are fitted with trackers these days so the tourists would be caught out and if anything went wrong on the road they would be in big trouble. Damo said before the trackers were fitted, the car hire companies would give guides $50 for reporting any hire cars on the gravel roads. It must have been quite a good source of income! I certainly wasn’t prepared to take the risk of the return journey down this road in my hire car. It was quite nice to have a day off from driving too, particularly the sort of driving I would have had to do on this road! And the tour was immensely enjoyable.
So I mentioned that there are crocodiles in the lower pool at Gunlom Falls. Most of them are freshwater crocodiles which are small and generally harmless to humans. Freshwater crocodiles can only eat things they can swallow whole which means that eating a human is a physical impossibility as freshwater crocodiles are pretty small.
So you can happily swim amongst the crocodiles there as freshwater crocodiles will leave you alone unless you start throwing stones at them to make them move for photos which apparently people from Darwin tend to do! The people of Darwin seem to have quite a bad reputation. They come into Kakadu from the city, throw stones at crocodiles and generally behave like idiots. They’re portrayed as a right load of hooligans.
The Darwin Times is apparently the Sunday Sport of Aussie newspapers. Damo said in any given week, 4 front page headlines would be about crocodiles, 2 would be about snakes and one about aliens!
While it’s safe to swim amongst the freshwater crocodiles in the lower pool at Gunlom, it has been known for the estuarine crocodiles, the infamous, man eating “salties”, to get into the pool at Gunlom Falls. Rangers check the water for them, but it’s not 100% guaranteed a man eating crocodile hasn’t got into the water.
It is 100% guaranteed that an estuarine crocodile has not got into one of the pools at the top of the falls because it would be impossible for a crocodile to get up there. It’s difficult enough for humans to get up there, so a crocodile would have no chance. It’s a long way up.
Damo was less accurate about was the path to the top of Gunlom Falls. He said the first two thirds was easy and the last third you’d be clambering over boulders as high as the bonnet of the car and if you had bad knees it was a bad idea. I really wanted to go to the top of the falls and swim in the infinity pool, but he made me nervous. I’d just about committed to staying at the bottom of the waterfall and braving the crocodiles, when me and Val, who was also on the tour, met an Aussie who said we really couldn’t miss the top of the waterfall and she’d done the hike in jandals (an Aussie word for flip flops). She said it was the best place in the park and we had to go up there. That convinced me and Val.
A new path is actually being constructed to the top of the falls, but it isn’t finished yet. It’s almost a shame that they’re constructing the easy path because it will make the top of the waterfall much more crowded for anyone who braves the horrible drive to Gunlom. And as it was, the path wasn’t that bad. I’ve done much harder hikes than that when I’ve been on my own. And for once I wasn’t the slowest person on the hike either. Val was much slower than me. She was older, but I’ve had people 20 years older than me bounding past me on some trails. Initially I was behind Val, but she was so slow I was scared I was going to get kicked in the face. I was much happier when I got in front of her and mostly managed to avoid ever being behind her on the hike again, both on the way up and on the way down.
Yes, there was a bit of clambering. But nothing insurmountable if you took your time and held on and there were plenty of rocks and trees to hold on to. I had to get down low to get down in some spots, my hands and clothes were filthy, but they’d both wash.
And I was so pleased I went up there. It was a definite highlight for me. The only problem was we didn’t have long enough. I could have stayed up there half the day. I got my bikini on, even if I did have a bit of a tummy on me at the moment. It was all I had with me and I was not missing out on a swim in the infinity pool.
The pool generally wasn’t too deep, it had quite a few rocks in it so I was half swimming and half walking to feel for the rocks so I didn’t bash my legs and then I got to the ledge of the infinity pool.
There was actually one below me, but this was close enough and no one was swimming in the one below, although some people had walked out there. There was no way I could walk on those rocks. I would have slipped and fallen over the edge to certain death. I was happy. This was a good place to be.
In fact when the Austrian lad, who was in the other vehicle on the tour, took a photo of me with my camera, when you look at it, I look like I’m right on the edge of the waterfall, about to go over myself. It’s a great shot.
All too soon it was over and I had to get dried and dressed and tackle the path back down. My knee was pulling a bit, but this was not a really difficult hike and I was so pleased I’d listened to the Aussie woman in flip flops. She was right. This was the best place in the park. I was so pleased I had not missed out on going to the top of Gunlom Falls. They really should not be missed. They were the highlight of my trip to Kakadu and certainly one of the highlights of this trip to Oz.
Val didn’t agree with the Aussie lass in flip flops and it seemed to me that she wished she hadn’t gone up there especially as she had no swimming gear and wasn’t going to swim. She would have been better off staying down at the bottom and having a paddle in the shallow part of the lower pool.
I met a man on my way down from the falls who was obviously English, but lived in Texas. I had my Yorkshire teeshirt on and he asked what part of Yorkshire I was from.
We had lunch and then I ran off down the path to the pool at the bottom of the falls to take some photos with the top of the falls in them so that I could show where I’d been swimming. I asked an Aussie couple to take a photo of me. They said I looked like a proper Aussie bushwoman covered in dirt and asked if I was a Yorkshire lass. I said I certainly was. And I think I’m a very intrepid one at that. If it hadn’t been for the car restriction, I would have been coming to the Gunlom Falls by myself. No doubt about that.
And then it was time to head off. We went to the Moline Rockhole waterfall down a road that wasn’t signposted, but unfortunately a tour bus followed us so after about 10 minutes and we were inundated with people. The water at this pool was deeper than at the Gunlom Infinity pools and also I’d just about dried off, so I contented myself with dangling my legs in the water and didn’t bother swimming. A Brazilian girl from Rio in a very small Brazilian bikini was at the pool very happily swimming, but her French boyfriend contented himself with dangling his legs in the water too.
The arrival of the tour bus party completely ruined the tranquility, so it was time for us to move on. We did make a brief stop at a viewpoint at the side of the road for photos. Me and Val had a photo with Damo and I had a photo with Val and Anna who was also on the tour with us.
Then it was just heading back to the Lodge to pick up some cheese and wine and relax by the billabong just beyond the staff quarters at Cooinda Lodge. The billabong was a beautiful spot and there was plenty of wildlife to watch as we sipped our wine and ate our cheese and crackers. There were cockatoos, eagles, egrets, wild buffalo, wild pig and saltwater crocodile. The crocodile was swimming in the water and then got onto the bank, although Damo claimed we were far enough away not to be in any danger. She then got back into the billabong.
It’s so hot and the water looks so inviting, it’s understandable why people want to swim there, but impossible to understand why they would take a risk when estuarine crocodiles are everywhere and they are fast enough, big enough, strong enough and hungry enough to grab you from the edge of the water, kill you and eat you.
Another statement made in Crocodile Dundee was when he said crocs don’t like fresh meat. The crocodile hunters on the Adelaide River said the crocodiles love fresh meat, they like to keep some meat to go rotten which will subsequently attract more hungry animals which they can then kill and eat. But I also heard conflicting information from one of the Kakadu guides that they don’t like fresh meat. I think, if they’re hungry enough, they will eat you, fresh or otherwise. So why take the chance?
That was the end of my hugely enjoyable day. The people on the other tour who did Gunlom in conjunction with another waterfall were a lovely young Austrian couple and an Aussie bloke who was very patient with me on the Gunlom waterfall walk, although to be fair, everyone was taking it steady, so he was probably just as slow as I was.
Damo told us a lot of stuff and quite a lot about Aboriginals because he knew some of them quite well. Everything is shrouded in secrecy, which I find very strange since I look at it all as quite superstitious. I have my own superstitions, like most people, which I tell myself are ridiculous, but are also no secret to anyone. Damo wasn’t permitted to tell us much about the Aboriginals. He’d worked in Kakadu for a while now and got to know a lot of the local people, had gained their trust and had been told lots of things about the Aboriginal community. But it was a closed to community that most people don’t get access to and most things that had been shared with him, he wasn’t allowed to disclose.
Today’s weather had been like the build up, the driver on the way back was saying. Hot with high humidity but no chance of rain. That’s what the build up is like, hot, high humidity, big clouds rolling in, thunder and lightning, but no rain. It must be spectacular, but getting no relief from rain for 2 months or more must be difficult. Those not acclimatised can go a bit crackers, it’s known as “going troppo”. Damo was telling us this French lady in her 50s who was working in Kakadu got drunk and trashed a house because the build up got to her and she went “troppo”. She couldn’t remember what she’d done and denied the whole thing. It could be very extreme. I’d heard about it. It hadn’t seemed that bad to me today other than I was sweating buckets on my climb up to the top of Gunlom Falls, but I would have expected that with the heat and a steep climb up to the top of a waterfall anyway. But to have that kind of weather for 2 months, I could understand how someone not used to it could go a bit loopy.
I’d had an amazing day. If I had to pick one day out of my trip to Australia that was the best, this would be the one.
I travelled to the Top End of the Northern Territory in early August 2019.
My day tour to Gunlom Falls was the Footprints of Kakadu tour and cost $224AUD. This included pick up from my accommodation in Jabiru, transportation through the National Park and stops at Gunlom Falls and Ikoymarrwa Rock Pool, lunch, cheese and wine at a private billabong, snacks and Damo! I booked this through Kakadu Tours and Travel who charged at 1.5% fee for using a credit card when I booked in March 2019.
You need to buy a pass to enter Kakadu National Park. The pass is valid for 7 days and costs $25AUD in the Dry Season. You can buy the pass online from the Parks Australia website.
I stayed in the Anbinik Resort in Jabiru. I booked this through Tourism Top End who offer instant confirmation and secure server bookings. When I booked in February 2019, Tourism Top End charged a fee for using credit cards.
I drove to Kakadu National Park from Darwin. I rented a car from Bargain Car Rentals in Darwin. I booked this through Tourism Top End who have special deals with several car hire agencies in Darwin including offering unlimited kilometres which is rare in the Northern Territory. Please note that driving hire cars on unpaved roads without a 4WD vehicle is not permitted.
Read about my other days in Kakadu National Park
Yellow Water and Anbangbang Billabong
Read about my time in Purnululu National Park
