Girls.

If you could ask one person to describe me it would be anything but female. I grew up with four sisters and I was the Tomboy. I can’t shop, I play to many video games, I curse like a mother fucker, never wear make-up and haven’t the slightest idea what colour fuchsia is.

Its no surprise that I generally end up hosting or surfing with males, I feel more comfortable around Nerdy types which more often than not are guys and I fail considerably on the womanly front. I have a couple of female friends but reality? They are just as nerdy as me.

However I ended up hosting another girl over the week. Deb from Amsterdam. We went out to ladies night and enjoyed free champagne & one male stripper. The stripper was ..bleh. Nice enough body but so obviously gay my fantasy was shattered. I crawled into a dark corner surrounding myself by screaming females hoping he wouldn’t drag me on stage as he played out several uncomfortable sexual scenarios with thus females. He seemed to favour the bent over forwards take them from behind. Sure hon, sure.

Deb turned out to be fantastic and super easy to get along with. Ok she talked a lot but that was good because I don’t talk enough sometimes, especially with girls because I never know what to say. And she never talked about make-up or shopping it was mainly travel and travel I can do.

On Saturday morning at some ridiculous hour (5am) we headed out to Kakadu for the day. I have never actually been to Kakadu in the wet season, camping is minimal, hot, sweaty & wet and the 3 hour drive makes a day trip hardly worth it. Still I had a few interested people Owen from Perth, Marlyn from Indonesia, Robert from Germany and of course Deb & I. We headed to Motor Car Falls & Boulder Creek which is the only 4wd track open in the wet and the falls apparently only flow in the wet as well. The hike to Motor Car is 7.5km return and the day was muggy & overcast. Perfect.

Heading up to Yurkmik viewpoint I was treated to an amazing view of Kakadu as it is in the wet. So beautiful and green, takes my breath away. The falls (motor car) were thundering down but the slight warning of estuarine crocodiles was enough to keep me out of the water. Maybe 10 years ago I wouldn’t have hesitated but with the increased crocodile activity I’ve seen enough pointless deaths over the last few years that I didn’t need to add myself as the statistic. I offered for the German to jump in first but he just rolled his eyes at me. Damn, what else are German’s good for except to be the crocodile bait.

We hiked back and stopped at Boulder Creek for lunch and a swim. We were the only people in sight and for a few hours enjoyed the luxury of our own private waterhole. After the swim we drove down to Nourlangie and wandered through the rocks admiring the aboriginal paintings. Heading up to another viewpoint we were treated to another sight only reserved for the wet, small waterfalls trickling down the walls, with green trees embedded in the face. I’ve always said Kakadu is not really worth visiting in the wet since the majority of sights are closed due to flooding but for a day we saw a lot of beautiful things and the dry just wouldn’t give you the same raw beauty.

Driving back I was tired and Owen kindly offered to take the wheel, we could barely see 10 metres in front of us. A few times when I was driving I accidently hit a flooded part of the road and the car almost slid out. Lucky I wasn’t going too fast. As Owen was driving we saw a road train practically stopped on the road, it was then we saw the flooding. Bear in mind it was nearly 7pm, overcast and raining like a motherfuc….

Anyway so we watched the road train push through the water and locked the wheels into 4wd and went over ourselves. Woops, the road turned out to be a lot deeper than originally thought, the water came up over the bonnet and we barely pushed through in 1st gear. Thank fuck for diesel & a snorkel. We finally made it home about 9pm and my fantastic mother had slow cooked an awesome meal of apricot chicken. I ended up sunburnt, my legs & shoulders were killing me, I was exhausted but overall it was a 10/10 day.