Matt Down Under

Last Tuesday I returned from the Jatbula Trail. It was a fantastic walk — very exhausting, very hot, but I made it and it was a great experience. I saw Aboriginal rock art that must have been hundreds if not thousands of years old, I swam in waterholes every day, I saw flocks of 50 or more Red-tailed Black Cockatoos flying past me and didn’t meet a single person between the start and finish of the trail.

In the end I cut it short by one day. The last campsite was only 4km away from the Edith Falls car park and I met some day walkers there, the first people I saw in five days. I happened to be the only person to start the trail last Friday, so until then I had every single campsite to myself — a wonderful solitary wilderness experience. When I met the people on the last campsite, somehow the dream was over and then the wish for a comfortable bed and a cold drink made me decide to skip the last site and walk out instead of staying for another night. I just felt it was enough and after five days of nothing but heat I really couldn’t camp there knowing I was only 4km away from a cold can of coke.

When I arrived at the Edith Falls kiosk, I bought some cold drinks and plenty of food. I felt dehydrated, like on most days on the trail, despite drinking lots of water. Coke from the fridge has never tasted better. For five days, it had been incredibly hard to get any kind of refreshment. With temperatures around 35°C, and hiking through dense bush land with hardly any wind, the only kind of refreshment I could get was from the few waterholes along the trail. Unfortunately the water was often so heated up from the sun, that it wasn’t very refreshing. When I filled up my bottle, it took a few minutes and the water was as warm as everything else.

The good thing however was, that the campsites were usually only 8-15km apart, so normally I arrived before midday, when the sun would be the hottest. I then spent the rest of the day in the waterhole, or just sitting in the shadow with a wet towel around my head.

As always I will post more detailed track notes soon, and a new photo album with the best of the 1100 photos I took. I had a lot of fun with a new 35mm/1.8 lens I had received only a day before I left to Katherine.

Overall I think the Jatbula Trail is a must-walk for any keen hiker in Australia. Beautiful scenery, every campsite at a swimming hole, lots of wildlife, wonderful weather and fairly easy to walk. And the trail has a maximum of 10 hikers per day.

What I loved about the Jatbula Trail

• Beautiful trail through very diverse country. Sometimes rocky, sometimes dry, sometimes green as rain forest. Amazing how green the Northern Territory can be, especially towards the end of the dry season.
• Great hiking trail for all those of us who don’t like the Tasmanian brass monkey weather (I found that term in a dictionary).
• Well-marked trail, usually there is a marker at least every 30-50m.
• Campsites in wonderful locations, always next to a waterfall or waterhole. All of them are inaccessible for crocodiles, so every afternoon you can go for a swim once you reached the campsite.
• Good facilities along the trail. Most campsites have an emergency call device to contact the rangers. Most of them also have fairly new toilet buildings, although I sometimes wished there were signs on the campsites. At 17 Mile Falls I really had to search for the toilet and at Sandy Camp I was surprised to discover one behind a small hill by accident — there was none marked on my map for this campsite. Like in Tasmania it is BYO toilet paper.
• Good distances of only 8-15km between campsites. Usually I started around 8am and arrived at the next one before midday. Very easy to walk too, it was never steep or particularly difficult — although there were some loose rocks and at the creek crossing at Crystal Falls it took me a while to find a safe route across without swimming. No dramas though.
• The trail passes some Aboriginal rock art sites that are probably hundreds, if not thousands of years old. The whole trail follows a route traditionally walked by the Jawoyn people, the traditional owners of Nitmiluk National Park, which makes it even more fascinating to walking, knowing you’re walking in thousand year old footsteps.
• Plenty of wildlife. Due to the heat it is hard to spot wallabies during the day, but I saw dozens of lorikeets and cockatoos, especially the Sulphur-crested and the Red-tailed Black Cockatoo. Sometimes large flocks were sitting in trees or flying past me, beautiful to watch.
• There is good transport available. A bus brought me from Katherine down to the gorge campsite, and another bus picked me up at Leliyn (Edith Falls) and brought me back to Katherine afterwards.

Things to keep in mind

• It was really very hot on the trail. You get up in the morning, you sweat. Before you even start walking, you sweat. When you go to bed, you sweat. In the tent, you sweat even more. Physically it turned out very demanding to be in constant heat with waterholes being the only relief you can get to cool down. Remember there won’t be air conditioning, there won’t be a fridge, sometimes there won’t even be wind. Just heat. All the time. I’m fairly fit and experienced but I could feel my limits. However I would love to walk the trail again anytime.
• There are buffaloes in the park. Although rangers are trying to get rid of them and I didn’t actually see any, they are still there and I saw their tracks along the trail. Not really much to worry though, if you see one, just keep a safe distance, usually they run away when they see you.
• The track gets closed from October until the end of the wet season. I walked it in the last possible week in September and still, there were some muddy sections along flood plains. I can imagine right after the end of the wet it could be significantly more difficult to cross the flood plains and creek crossings.
• One of the biggest annoyances in the Northern Territory are flies. Usually I go Aboriginal-style and simply ignore them, but on this trail I sometimes wished I had a fly net. I always applied insect repellent, but it didn’t help much. And some of them bite, although surprisingly I didn’t see a single mosquito. I ended up going to bed even before sunset every night, just to escape the flies.
• At some waterholes (like 17 Mile Falls) submerged rocks were sometimes covered in algae. Be sure not to sit on them or touch them, they can be full of leeches.