Nourlangi Rock, Kakadu NP

We have now spent five days in Kakadu National Park spending two nights at Merle Camp, then one night at Muriella camp and a further two nights at Madugal camp.  These are all managed by the rangers and offer unpowered sites with excellent toilet and shower facilities powered by solar.  They are popular camping areas as they are closest to the various gorges and falls etc. 

 While at Muriella we visited Nourlangi Rock.  This is a large rock which seems to appear without the normal gorge around it.  The rock has been an Aboriginal shelter for thousands of years.  We particularly wanted to visit the Aboriginal shelter which also contains a significant amount of art.  We were fortunate to arrive at the main shelter just as the ranger was giving a talk explaining the various paintings and traditions.  The interesting fact about the painting of the kangaroo is that this helps to age the painting as it is known that there have not been any kangaroo in Kakadu National Park for over 350 years.

The walk was not very long and although commenced with a series of steps was relatively easy after that.  Connor was keen to walk to the rim of the rock so headed off along the track but obviously took a wrong turning somewhere along the way and met us back at the ranger walk.  At least there was no difficulty in meeting up with him! 

It is the height of the tourist season early in the dry so there are plenty of visitors about.  We are often amazed at just where some of the overseas tourists head off to in their Britz or Apollo campers.  They certainly cram a lot of sightseeing into a short time and often they arrive into the camp grounds very late in the day, after dark, and head off before I am out of bed in the morning. 

The first photo in this series shows the walk around the various paintings at Nourlangi Rock.  I have included another painting of a kangaroo - we have been told that the white and the yellow ochre lasts much longer than the red colouring and this was quite evident.  We have many more photos of various paintings, far too many to include here, but you can tell we were very interested in this.

And just to prove that we were really there, a photo of Peter and Connor beside some of the paintings.

The temperatures have been very warm, mostly in the early 30's with humidity around 60%.  Walking in the coolness of the rock was great but it was a different story as soon as we were out in the open. 

The actual rock at Nourlangi was really large and quite severe with sheer rock faces of various colours.  There is a walk to the top as we saw the sign saying twelve kilometres (but too far and too difficult for me so we didn't venture along the track) but we never spoke to anyone who had actually completed it.  Connor thought that rock climbing the face of the cliff would be easy, and he may be correct, but we were uncertain what he was basing this statement on.  There are no commercial rock climbing adventures within the park.