It's not dead, Jim.

Hey all, sorry for being so lazy with the updates during the last days of our trip through Australia! Apart from having few time in Sydney, I must admit that I was simply not "in the mood" - so I spared you a few probably boring lines of text (not that there wouldn't have been anything to write about, but my writing tends to get weary, when I'm not "in the mood", I guess :).

This blog is anything but dead and I will keep posting short stories and pictures of our tour during the next weeks and months.

We are now back in Germany for almost two weeks and we are currently in the process of copying the images from our digital camera back to the PC - which is a bit tricky as the file-system of the portable harddisk we took with us had decided to go completely nuts at some point of our tour (this also led to the situation, that all of the hundreds of MP3's we had prepared for our trip to Australia simply vanished, leaving us alone with three cheap Frank Sinatra CD´s for most of the Outback ...oh boy... but that is another story).

All in all, we have roughly 2000 images from the digital camera and about 1000 images from the normal camera. Digital cameras are somewhat evil, as they allow you to make heaps of the most senseless pictures, making you develop a mentality of "look there [click] - and there that mountain [click] and that cloud over there looks funny [click]". Usually it was me, making the most senseless pictures of all. I remember spotting a cloud that looked perfectly like a platypus, a crocodile and a turtle dancing together in a circle (HA, when did you ever see a cloud like THAT? ;) But I must admit that I had problems identifying that impressive sight later on the photo again (one of the clouds might be a part of the shell of a turtle... ).
One might call it "fast-food-photography", but thats why we had two cameras - one for the "quick&dirty" images and one for the superb ones (I hope). Well, the term "quick&dirty" is a bit misleading, as we made lots of fabulous pictures with the digital camera as well. Here are a few for the start (descriptions will follow):

Remember my comment on the Ghan being a "long train"? See for yourself:

The following pictures are all from Kakadu National Park which is located next to Darwin. Kakadu (or "Gagadju" as the Aborigines spell it) is one of the most famous australian national parks and I will soon dedicate a whole article to it. What you (luckily) don't see on the pictures is, that it is relatively crowded with tourists, which is a bit nasty sometimes, especially when you experienced the emptiness of the Outback during the days before. The pictures were all made at dawn in the huge floodplains that Kakadu is famous for - mostly from a boat that floated around with hundreds of tourists for the "morning tour". These boats are - apart from a few walking tracks - the best way to experience the floodplains of Kakadu. Especially for the zillions of animals, that is - as it would be much more disturbing for the wildlife to have thousands of tourists shuffling around on their own, than watching a few boats scurry by each day. Wildlifewise there are heaps of wild animals, especially millions and millions of birds, but also wild horses, buffaloes, crocodiles, wallabies and many more. More about Kakadu during one of my next posts.

Wild horses in the mist at Kakadu

Reflections Part 1

Reflections Part 2

These rocks belong to the "Devils Marbles" - a very weird looking rock formation near Tennant Creek in the Outback. Most of the "Devils Marbles" rocks are absolutely round and I will post more pictures during the next days. This picture is not really typical for the Devils Marbles, but I liked the colors and shapes:

This is me before a billabong in Karumba, up at the Gulf of Carpentaria. I might add, that this was Ulrikes "dead animal day" (see my "Barramundi bite" post) so its good to see that a few animals were actually alive up there ;) In fact, there are about 10 kangaroos and lots of ducks with me on this picture.

Reflections Part 3 (Is that Australia in our rearviewmirror? You bet it is!)

Hmm, looks like nature decided to place the perfect waterfall right before our camera.

We were certainly not. The creature on the right hand side of the sign is a "cassowary" (see my "Cassowary encounter" post), though it looks a bit like the roadrunner, don't you think? Meep meep!

This is one of the last 1500 remaining cassowaries that you can see wild and free in this world. I hope the Australians are able to keep their numbers steady, but I am a bit in doubt.

This is an "Australian Magpie" - a very common bird at the eastcoast. We also called them "freeloaders", as they tend to be very interested in free food of all kinds. Check out their weird call here (*.au file).

This is the "Singing Ship" in the town of Emu Park at the eastcoast - a memorial to Cpt. James Cook who sailed past the area between 25 May and 27 May 1770. I wonder what they would have erected if he had actually set foot on the beach ;) I made the picture from an unusual angle to hide the sun behind the peak of the memorial. Seen from the side, the memorial has several pipes that make whistling sounds when the wind from the sea blows through them (which is almost constantly the case). It sounds a bit like an Australian Magpie (see the link above).