Day Eighteen - Darwin to Dover Street

the final day passed in slow motion fast forward. spooning on a hammock in the middle of winter...

eating crêpes with chocolate and crème while dripping with sweat at a sunday morning market...in the middle of winter.

saying goodbye to our sexy hosts and catching a hybrid taxi to the airport, all the while sweating it out in shorts and t-shirt...in the middle of winter.

eating 4 frosty fruits tropical flavour on the flight home...

did i mention that we had been spooning in a hammock in the middle of winter?

and back to the apocalyptic freeze of melbourne where we've said goodbye to shorts and thongs, turned the heaters up to full blast...and plans are afoot for an even grander adventure...!

Day Seventeen - Darwin

we arrived in darwin on a late friday afternoon, headed straight to the bottleshop, then to 'asian noodle' for some takeaway asian noodle, and finally made our way to the coast in the city's north where we plonked ourselves down in the middle of darwin's gorgeous nudist beach, tore off our clothes, and watched the sunset naked drinking red wine and eating vegetable laksa. need i say it? it was glorious.

the wonderful zee and her delicious girlfriend emma put us up for our stay in darwin. they lived in this massive 4.5 bedroom house with 4 other people, 3 kittens, 2 hammocks, a tropical garden surrounding a swimming pool (see photo), and kitchen/dining area straight out of a 70's porn shoot. we loved it - thank you ladies!!!

jasper had to be returned on the saturday, so we woke early to unpack two and a half weeks of adventure and memory from his insides, give him a final scrub, and return him to wicked campers. despite previous bad experiences with hire cars (fuck u avis scumbags!), as soon as we told wicked-darwin that the drunkards in wicked-broome hadn't let us properly list jasper's pre-existing damage, they ticked the 'checked' box and finalised the return of our bond with only the most cursory glance in jasper's direction. thanks goodness.

check out my macho boyfriend: grrrrr!

we met up with emma at the parap market for some smoothie and laksa. there's something asian about darwin's markets: they're bustling and juicy and tropical and open and alive. so many wonderful things about that city! you don't even realise how much you've missed it until you get back there. g and i are putting serious consideration into making it our future (temporary) home. emma and zee lent us their bikes, and we were drawn magnetically back to the nudist beach for a further exploration of our liberty...

...and it was a complete liberation. we had more fun than we thought humanly possible on that little strip of sand: splashing in the jellyfish infested waters, mixing with strange naked people and being even stranger, getting that all-over body tan, and even discovering what else is in the teaches of peaches.

hot diggety check out this romantic shot that zee took of your boys under a palm tree watching the sun set at east point!

the girls took us out to a fancy restaurant on the beach where we had the best seats in the house, watched a partial lunar eclipse over dinner, and even had some fireworks go off half way through the night about 43 centimetres away from my right ear drum.

and of course which self-respecting person could visit darwin without an evening at throb nightclub, where the transexual with australia's largest breast implants put in an appearance to a thunderous lack of applause, a blond drag-queen with perfect breasts, a mischievous smile and legs that never ended had zee and g mesmerised and sliding off their seats with their tongues on the floor, and your gang of 4 dominated and redominated darwin's hottest dancefloor.

what better way to spend our last evening in paradise?!

Day Sixteen - Litchfield NP to Darwin

it was back to the buley rockhole at the crack of dawn to wash off all the blood and mosquito body parts. confucius say: when in paradise, fkk.

we took a detour down to 'the lost city', a bunch of rock formations dotted with human excrement and toilet paper.

we walked from the pestilential greenant creek to the average experience of tjaetaba falls, where one could bathe in a rockpool whose edge formed part of a 20 metre drop into the forests below. sounds amazing to even think about, but the murky waters and lack of view contrasted sharply with the other incredible places we had been.

and in our final stop before darwin, we visited florence falls. florence falls is a special place, with a plunge pool filled with massive fish and boulders, fed by two cascades, and packed with humans at any time of the year. young hoons with perfectly sculpted bodies and perfectly absent brains were climbing to the top of the waterfalls and doing flips off them to the amazement of the adoring crowds gathered below when suddenly, as if in some sort of shared religious vision, the ranger appeared (materialised?) at the top of one waterfall and started shouting in a macho voice for everyone to climb down (or was it the virgin mary wearing a ranger's outfit, fake beard and a very large pair of socks stuffed down the front of her pants?). in an act of defiance, all the hoons did their final backwards cartwheels from the 10 metre cliffs into the shallow waters below. it was amazing to watch, but i got that sick feeling in my stomach that someone's neck was going to snap, reinforced by my memories of all the young people with cervical spinal injuries that i saw when i was working in darwin (shudder). one guy (who was doing the most impressive flips) had even lost the skin off his nose and forehead, as if he'd already smacked his face against a rock at the bottom of the water. a strong candidate for the darwin awards.

it was at florence falls that i received one of the best compliments i've ever had in my life. a young frenchman overheard g and i talking and joined us for a short conversation whilst perched on a boulder in the middle of the plunge pool. afterwards he turned to me and asked "so are you belgian?". "so are you belgian?!!!" i almost had to be carried off in a stretcher.

when we'd had our fill, we decided to jump back into jasper and head off to our final destination. a minute before leaving, we found g's doppelgänger lounging on the banks of a river in the form of a goanna. the head and limbs were a bit different, but the jellybelly was unmistakeable!

Day Fifteen - Walker Creek and Buley Rockhole

we awoke at sandy creek, and then off we went. i thought i should put in at least one photo of the massive magnetic termite mounds that are found throughout the park. apparently they're a real drawcard, but g and i found them a bit on the boring side. with a capital B. out of interest, they are not magnetic (contrary to popular belief and even what one NT tourist website i found claims), but line up north-south to avoid excessive exposure to the melting midday sun!

did anyone get confused in that last paragraph? did anyone get confused by the use of the term 'melting' as an adjective to describe the sun, or was it comprehensible? i recently re-discovered a project that i had written on the libyan desert in grade 3, and was surprised and somewhat offended to find that the only correction made by miss jacobi (my butch lesbian grade 3 teacher who was kidding no-one with her sports outfits) was an underlining of the word 'melting' in the phrase "without water they will die under the melting sun". the word was underlined not once, but twice, and had a question mark placed next to it. miss jacobi also saw fit to make a single comment, this one with regards to my drawing of a sun (that i had pasted onto my title page), "it could have been cut out straighter". little did i suspect at the time that it was for neither her nor i to be discussing what should or shouldn't be straight, but i did suspect that the bitch had massively overlooked the time and effort i had put into researching that project and done me a disservice by picking on what was clearly a comprehensible adjective, and a minor fault on a title page, when no-one else in that class of 8 years olds even had a fucking title page. damn you, miss jacobi - damn you!

what was funky about walker creek was that you had 8 private little campgrounds - each large enough to fit just one camping group - and you could just pop your name onto a chalkboard at the entry to the walk to reserve your camping spot for the night. only one spot - number 6 - was open to being shared at all times - and this was because it was the best. g and i decided to fkk it.

now we had no problem being fkk, and we were certainly not embarrass. but it seemed that those who arrived to check out the area were embarrass: they be embarrass for us! it's not like we were standing there guns blazing as if we were in the fresh produce section of a saturday morning market trying to make a sale - we were discrete: discretely naked, and nakedly discrete. one group after the other came tramping down the trail until they suddenly realised that the two boys frolicking in the deep fish-filled pools of area number 6 - pools flowing with crystal clear water that shimmered in the sun as it dappled through the eucalypts - were fresher than fresh, and stunned by their own reactionary self-consciousness, they then stopped dead in their tracks: and they be embarrass. g and i reckon that area number 6 on the walker creek trail may have been the most beautiful and magical place we visited. it was glorious!

we soldiered on around wangi falls which was closed for swimming secondary to crocodile danger, and checked out tolmer falls. i don't know about you, but there's nothing less satisfying than looking at a waterfall that you can't swim under.

mid-afternoon we arrived at buley rockhole, a series of deep little plungepools each feeding into the next by small cascades. the crowds had descended upon the place, so it gave our eyes the chance to do some much-needed staring at hot strangers.

we set up camp in the nearby camping area and made our first and only fire of the whole trip! you weren't supposed to collect firewood there (many people arrived with their own wood strapped to the roofs of their vans), and though i'm usually quite good about following sensible rules in areas of natural beauty, ultimately it was the mosquitoes that forced my hand. they arrived like a plague as soon as the sun set, and even dousing our bodies in DEET had little effect. i felt that smoking them out was our only recourse, and naturally the hours of sitting by the campfire staring at the flames, the stars above, or the eyes of my lover were unintended but hugely enjoyable sequelae.

it was that night that g introduced me to the art of cooking the perfect marshmallow. how had i gone 30 years without ever knowing that when you cook a marshmallow, it should be lightly toasted on the outside but liquid in the centre? it is because i am not a man of patience. the frog, however, is a man of unlimited patience, and once taught, this art changed my life forever.

that night, the mosquito tribe returned to avenge their smoked-out cousins. through closed doors and windows, they infiltrated jasper, and waking from a deep sleep by the dentist's drill buzzing of their wings in my ears, i found g's naked and uncovered body dotted with the little bloodsuckers. do any of you remember e.honda from street fighter II - the big fat sumo whose special move was the 100 hand slap? well that night, on waking to the horror of g's mosquito-covered body, i was transported to my video-game past, and a split-second later i did an e.honda and delivered the hundred hand slap to all exposed areas of skin. those little mosquitoes were gone before they could even press down-down-back-punch. all i needed to complete the picture was the grand master sitting on a throne behind us looking down on my insect opponents with contempt before nodding my way and commanding: "finish them".

Day Fourteen - Douglas Hot Springs to Sandy Creek

so slow that we were practically in rewind, we emerged from jasper bleary eyed to find that even the neighbours were having a smoke. It was time for an oat hit.

and then a morning frolic down at the adjacent springs with everyone else who had made the discovery.

we trucked on up to robin falls, just outside litchfield national park. the falls themselves were like a massive set of rock stairs that had collapsed in the middle, as if cracked by an overweight giant descending the steps. i suspect the giant may have been the winner of last year's masterchef australia: julie goodwin, known as 'the elephant' in cooking circles. or perhaps it was an ancient tectonic plate shift that generated a point of weakness (though after witnessing the horror of julie's appearance on this year's final, one really does wonder...). in any case, it created some cool little rockpools to enjoy.

next to the entry point to the falls track was a beautiful running stream that evoked tasmanian moorland. we had another little dip before a friendly snake decided to join us in the water and we exited in a manner that defied gravity, matrix-style.

we arrived at sandy creek, our campspot for the day, and then marched on off to the tjaynera falls a few kilometres away.

and that's it for day 14! see you next time xxx

Day Thirteen - Leliyn to Douglas Hot Springs

There was something of a post-apocalyptic feel to edith falls the following morning, as strange winds buffeted the camp ground, carrying off unsecured items of clothing and toppling the occasional small child. it calmed down enough for a breakfast of champions.

at pine creek, you turn off onto the kakadu highway and travel about 50km before you get into the wonderful kakadu national park itself. at the entry point is a board showing which parts of the park are open (not much when we were there because of the recent rains), and which parts are closed (all the good bits, including jim jim falls, twin falls and gunlom!) readers: what is the consensus here? is it or is it not illogical to have a closed sign at the park entry when you could have it at the turn off 50km back? i ask you again: is it not just plain fucking rude? we were scandalised by this unaustralian behaviour, and the fact that we had driven 100km unnecessarily. i was also quite miffed at not being able to show g all the places that i had come to know and love in kakadu, but in fact it was a blessing in disguise, as we were able to discover together lots of other little unknown gorges and hotspots in the area (and it gives g and i yet another reason to move to darwin later on!!!). the first discovery was umbrawarra gorge, arguably created by the rainbow serpent explicitly for future gayboy FKK frolicking.

the second, our camping spot for the night, was the wonderful douglas hot springs, in which hot water bubbled up through rocks and sand to fill what was essentially a billabong separated from the main river by a sandbank. further downstream the cold river and the hot billabong joined together, with a mixing of currents, temperatures and tourists. it was awesome!

at this stage in the holiday we were in slow motion, so afternoons consisted of lying around spooning, reading, spooning, eating, and then spooning some more.

and: check out this tiny grasshopper reading chinese!!!