Day Twelve - Nitmiluk National Park

another sneaky-peak into the depths of jasper's bed-chamber. morning spoons were quite often refractory to attempts at getting up.

given that i couldn't cook a decent meal with a gun to my head, i was relegated to the duty of preparing breakfast for the two of us every morning. in fact, g ended up loving himself sick over the sumptuous meals that i prepared, and who could blame him? that morning, charged up on pure oat energy, we headed back into nitmiluk national park to check out katherine gorge.

skippy turned up in the carpark just as we were parking, so i headed over to pick his brain about the best walks to do south of the river. the discussion soon evolved into a heated debate about the viability of kangaroo meat as an alternative food source in this age of industrial agriculture, and it evidently gave the animal an appetite, for he snatched my map and made short work of it in the nearby bushes.

the gorge itself was quite beautiful, but the lack of access to water in the midday heat was a downer, so we scampered away to a place where we could frolic as nature had intended.

that place was leliyn (edith falls) in the northern end of nitmiluk national park, a glorious camping area with plunge pools and waterfalls that i had discovered 3 years ago on my brisbane to darwin roadtrip, and that i had always wanted to take g back to. some of you may remember me blogging about it! (click here for flashback)

on a fateful day in late 1993, minutes before leaving with my family on a camping trip to south australia, i undertook to shave my entire face for the first time in my life with a twin blade hand-held razor. finishing with skin as smooth as it had been only months before when puberty struck, i jumped into the car without a thought to splashing myself with alcohol or doing anything to soothe the insidious burning sensation that was contaminating the skin of my face. this single error led to an orgy of involuntary scratching that lasted the entire dusty fortnight, and prompted a vicious cycle of skin sensitivity that left me carrying a small bottle of ethanol in my pocket to school for over six months with which to burn the weeping flesh at regular intervals when the intensity of the itch threatened to trigger a psychotic episode. needless to say, one of the repercussions have been that i am now loathe to shave, and in fact i have only used clippers to shorten my facial hair (rather than shave it) for some years now. that said, the itch of a semi-beard on one's throat is particularly unpleasant, especially when clogged with red dust, and g and i found our first clipper of the holiday to be agonisingly pleasant. here are some before and afters.

and that's it! we spent the dying hours of the day making multiple trips back to the kiosk for frosty fruit tropical flavour, savouring the winter heat on our skin, charging the batteries of all our little gizmos, and getting cornered in the toilet/shower block by a 48 year old belgian man who saw fit to offload his entire life story into our ears in one interminable monologue, including choice descriptions of his love-affair with an overweight alcoholic veterinary surgeon whose breasts swelled like watermelon as she went into heart failure - a story that has left us shuddering to this day.

a woof wolf on the wolf walk