DiNo's Travels Around Australia - 2014/2015/16/17: Day 62 Ranger Mine and Ubirr

Jabiru, while it is the centre of Kakadu, is only a small town and once you have seen the Jabiru Lake in the centre of town, the bakery and the Kakadu Hotel, there is not much left to see. So we left town for a bit.

First we checked out ERA's Ranger uranium mine which is about 8km out of town. They have been mining ore out of there (open cut) since 1982. The spoil hills and the hole in the ground are something to see.

This afternoon we headed in the direction of Oenpelli to see the aboriginal rock art at Ubirr, about 45km from Jabiru. This was more like the Kakadu we had expected. We travelled for about 30km along the base of the Arnhem Land escarpment. The rock formations were fascinating but one couldn't stop to photograph them all. We crossed over a couple of creeks one of which, Magela Ck, still had several inches of water over it. We passed by swamps with abundant water lilies and open areas covered by the brilliant green grass one associates with these wetlands. Mind you there were plenty of eucalyptus tress in the drier forest areas.

The country/forest is managed by regular burning and there was plenty of smoke around today, no doubt aided by a very strong wind. In spite of the wind and the high temperature - you guessed it 33 degrees - the fires are quite subdued and don't do a lot of damage, but blackened tree trunks and forlorn looking pandanus are the norm.

In all we covered 155km today. Roads are good and the underside of the car got a good cleaning at Magela Creek. Two piece of trivia - we have left the red dirt behind for a while, and the gnome reappeared again today.

** Correction- in yesterday's blog we mentioned the East and West Alligator Rivers. These were in fact the east and west arms of the West Alligator River. How do we know this? We saw the East Alligator River today for the first time. We felt obliged to make this correction before anyone drew it to our attention.