Week 2 .We are camping at Douglas river Hot Pools into the Northern Territory of Australia With Lou and Colin and Sophia.
The bush here is soo dry. It is the middle of the dry season, the ground is composed of beautiful white quartz crystal sands filled with jewels. The river snakes past the campsite mixing in places with hot rain water, 2million years old welling up from the Artesian water table. The ground darts with skinks that fltit from my footsteps and hide under the tinder dry gum tree leaves. In the morning we have seen wallabies thumping away from us on the other side of the river and we have found the skin of a snake and at night we can see thousands of reflective tiny eyes of spiders staring back into our headtorches.
Boyd and I sat up the first night reflecting on the challenges of parenting while traveling .At home, the challenge was finding enough to do. Here, the challenge is to find enough down time to process everything that the kids see. Yesterday, after being super grouchy , I spent an hour with Tara in the familiarity of our tent talking about Pop Pop s strategy with crocodiles. Pop Pop ( her imaginary friend) gets the ants to build a concrete bridge over the crocs pool and gets different type of ants to roll into a ball the size of my head and form a scary face to scare the crocs away when they come to close.Then we drew some pictures of our journey and she was right as reign again. Luke has been heaps happier too... No tantrums for 2 days:-)
Last night we made camp by one of the more secluded hot pools after dinner and Colin set up a fire and some music. The sun went down, the super moon came out and lit the whole area up soo brightly. Then the jet fighters zoomed across the sky. We counted four in formation, sometimes lights on and sometimes off.
Colin was on fine form. He is supercharged energy bunny at the best of times. We had hardly sat down and he had lit the pools with tea lights and then we were OFF to find freeshies ( freshwater crocodiles}.
We all had our head torches on. Colin was carrying Sophia who had the big strong spotting torch and we could hear him roaring "Get that torch out of my eyes!" as he zoomed off into the distance. Us Kiwis and POM's were feeling a bit cautious. Boyd was carrying Tara who was not happy, she had been scratching her bum all day and worms had been mentioned, so she was quietly sobbing with her finger up her bum. Boyd was barefoot and in two minds as to if he wanted to find crocodiles. I followed carrying Lukey who also had a spotting torch and was happily flicking it off and on. Now I am quite cautious about spiders. Especially Ozzy ones. Earlier in the day I had to admit to Tara that I didn't like spiders so much . She said. "Don't worry mummy You just flick them off like this - I saw Colin doing it. I'll go first I'm not scared.".
There weren't any crocs in the first water-way. Colin was cursing the 'civilians' that he had seen trooping through half an hour before. So off he darted through a river. " We'll go up to the lake, find one there, you guys 'right?" And he was gone , fast as a skink. Boyd stared suspiciously at the logs lurking under the water and I crouched as low as I could as we crashed through the bushes flicking nervously at the imaginary spiders caught in my hair. Tara would wimper about her itchy bum , and far off in the distance we could hear Colin roaring "Get that torch OUT of my eyes!!"
The tiny red dot gliding slowly on the other side of the lake was all we saw of the croc this time. We also found a cane toad ("See here, if you irritate the toad like this... See the bubbles there coming from its glands- strychnine that is ") And plenty of little thumping frogs. But no snakes. We gladly balanced as we crossed the big log over the river back toward the campsite and the fire and Lou Lou and the beer.
