I just had the best week ever! Going to Mary River National Park to volunteer was definitely one of the best things I've done on this trip so far. We got to ride quad-bikes (that's something of a cross between a motorbike and a small tractor) all day, saw loads of beautiful scenery and wild animals and even got to start a bush fire!

As you might recall, I was a bit worried that volunteering to weed would be really hard, back-breaking work. But it wasn't like that at all! It felt more like being on a fancy an adventure-safari then like work.

Into the bush

For me the first surprise came with the selection of the actual campsite. After having had spoken to the volunteer-coordinator at the Wildman Ranger Station I was under the impression that we would stay close to the ranger station and make our weeding trips from there. I could hardly have been more wrong. As soon as I arrived we climbed onto three 4WD utility trucks (UTEs) and one big 5.5 ton truck and set off on a two hour journey through on and off a four wheel track to our campsite. On the way we had to ... ehm ... "dismantle" a fence since the truck didn't fit through the gate, but the rangers being rangers and therefore good people by definition, rebuilt it after we had gone through.

There's a croc behind the toilet!

The second thing that really surprised me about the campsite was how close it was to the Mary River. Or, to be more exact, to the Corroboree Billabong which is part of the Mary River system, this being the area with the most saltwater-crocodiles worldwide. And it did not really ease my - let's call it tension - that we actually scared off a small (say, two meters) saltwater crocodile when we set up the toilet. After we set up our tents one of the rangers jokingly told us that the idea of setting up your tent at a place like this was to get as many living bodies between you and the river as possible. Very funny! Later we heard a saltie take a cow just a few meters away from our camp. There was a loud "MOOO!" a big splash, the cries of a few startled birds and then there was nothing. Not a single sound except for the soft splashing of the waves the croc made when it dragged the cow under water. I can tell you - I had a lot of dreams involving crocodiles out there! We also saw quite a few during the day. Most of them were pretty small (up to three meters) but we saw one that was definitely over four meters, maybe even five meters long. It was huge! And I’m telling you - these critters are far more impressive if you know that they live just a few minutes walk away from your tent then when seeing them from a boat on a tour or in a crocodile farm. Fortunately though the crocs were pretty scared and made a dive into the river whenever they heard us coming. Unfortunately this means that I wasn't able to take a single photo of them. Well, I suppose I still prefer it this way, though. And after all I could have gotten a much closer look if I had gone for a swim into the water. But no, we won't go there. No way!

Getting real close to the animals

So, the crocs left us alone and we left them alone. But there was a lot of other wildlife as well: We saw wallabies, goanas, whipsnakes and tons of birds, among them sea eagles and some pretty big water birds (jabirus and others). I've never understood why some people would go someplace to do bird watching. But having been out there in the wetlands, with all these beautiful birds around, I've started to understand the fascination. On our first day we also built some pit-traps and set up some alley-traps and cage-traps to capture small mammals. But unfortunately we didn't catch anything all week. I on the other hand really seemed to attract more animals then I cared for. And I'm not talking about the mozzies - though they were bad enough. On the first morning I woke up just to find a massive spider sitting on the outside of my tent door. I.e.: I couldn't open the tent without the spider coming into the tent. Now, I'm normally not squeamish about spiders, but in Australia they can be venomous and dangerous! And of course there was no way for me to tell whether the spider-belly I was looking at belong to the dangerous or the more harmless kind. Eventually I managed to get it to retreat to another part of my dome-tent by tapping on the inside of the tent door and it turned out that it was just a harmless Huntsman Spider. But it gave me a bit of a scare - and I'm sure that, if you click on the link at the end of the text, you'll understand why. The other closer-than-intended encounter with an animal happened the night after. We had just looked at a Black Whipsnake that made it's way through the grass besides our camp ("Don't worry. They are not dangerous. They'll just give you a nasty bite and you'll have to get to the doctor and will get to whine for a few days, but they won't kill you") when I decided it was time for bed. So I went behind the next bush (the crocodile-harbouring toilet quite far away), keeping my eyes firmly on the ground for more of these not-dangerous-at-all (yeah, right!) animals and did what I came to do. But then, going back to my tent, I all of a sudden felt something move inside my pants! At first I thought I had imagine it, but then, it was there again. I was cold, slightly wet and at about knee-level in my jeans. My heart dropped like a stone. So I made it into my tent and thought about what to do next. Call for help? How would I get my pants down without risking getting bitten by that thing? But then rationality kicked in and I thought: "If it hasn't bitten me until now, it probably can't bite at all." So I slowly and very carefully (better safe the sorry) dropped my jeans fully expecting to see some nasty looking huge spider to emerge when I saw that all it had been was a rather scared looking Rocket Frog that was more than happy to leave both my pants and my tent. Puh. Fortunately these were all the close encounters I had during that week, but they got my adrenaline going alright!

Ride that quad! Yeehaaaa!

Speaking of adrenaline: As I have mentioned in an earlier post, the weeding we were doing did not involve crawling through the wetlands on all fours, ripping out weeds by the stump. No, what we did was way cooler! We got to ride on quad bikes, with a tank of chemicals on the back of the quad and a spray gun and simply had to spray the weed we were looking for. And those quads are fun! Believe me, there is a reason why they are called All Terrain Vehicles! These little babies go through and onto almost anything: Up steep climbs, through deep mud, shallow creeks and billabongs (put your feed up, so that the leeches can't get you) and they are fast! And it's really tempting to go fast on them, too! Especially when you are driving through 1.5 meters high grass on seemingly flat floodplains. Too bad when you happen to hit a buffalo hole! Fortunately none of us tipped his or her bike, but I almost did it three times, having three of the four wheel in the air. And once I was hit by a big branch of a tree I narrowly missed, but that one fortunately got me straight across the chest and not in the face. So it was all good and exciting and good fun, too.

Mimosa Pigra - the sensitive enemy

But of course we were not only there to ride at neck breaking speeds through the gorgeous landscapes. We were there to kill weed. Or, to be more exact, we were there to kill Mimosa Pigra:

In just 30 years, one weed has taken over vast stretches of the Northern Territory. Mimosa pigra, a native of tropical America, has consumed more than 800 square kilometres of wetlands. (...) Full-time search-and-destroy teams patrol the (...) area, guarding against an invader that has resisted every chemical and mechanical offensive

That's the enemy we were up against! Actually I think it's a pretty cool plant since it reacts to your touch. The leaves curl when you touch them. And it's this ability that apparently brought it to OZ. The Darwin Botanical Gardens thought that this would be a pretty cool attraction for it's visitors. But unfortunately the plant escaped into the wild, where it is doing very, very well. So we were riding on our quads all day, looking for Mimosa and spraying it with a healthy dose of a herbicide that according to DowAgro is less toxic for humans than a cup of coffee (Yeah, right!). Except for the last day we didn't find that much Mimosa though, so we had a lot of opportunity to simply enjoy the landscape and watch the animals running from the noise of our quads. And then to return home in the evening to have a nice dinner that whichever ranger was on camp-duty had prepared for us. Since we were so close to the river the rangers also had a boat there on which they showed us around on the Mary River and at night they took us "spotting", i.e. trying to find nocturnal animals. They have an owl here that sounds just like a dog! Weird shit.

Burn, baby, burn!

During the last two days we got another "attraction": bushfires. The guy in charge of the ranger station decided that this was a good time to start some minor bushfires in order to burn anything that could fuel a major bushfire later in the dry season, when even big trees light up light matches. So some of the rangers and one of us four volunteers got to help with starting the fires. Unfortunately that wasn't me, but from what Pip said it was pretty cool: She was sitting on the back of a UTE, holding a "bug sprayer" (it's a very small flame thrower) into the grass while the truck was going through the grasslands. We still got to see our fair share of the fires though, since we had to drive our quads through areas where the fire had just been through, so that smoke tinged the sunlight yellow and where sometimes flames where still licking on dead trees. One night in particular was very memorable, since we had two big bushfires going only a few kilometres away from the camp so that the horizon was all orange from the flames. It was quite beautiful and also a bit exciting. Though we were of course never in any danger.

Cool people and a cool time

The people I was there with were pretty cool as well. We were four volunteers, four rangers and one guy from a nearby cattle station who helped as well. I didn't make any life long friends but we got on very well (though you could tell that two of the rangers couldn't stand each other) and had a good time.

So: did I enjoy my trip? I loved it! And I can only recommend doing something like this to everyone who comes to OZ. Simply call the government department that is in charge of the national parks in whatever state you are in and ask them for a chance to volunteer. It's great fun!

Btw: The photos on the left are just a selection of the photos I took during my trip. Click here to see all photos.

On the web:
Mary River National Park
Huntsman Spider
Black Whip Snake
Rocket Frog
Everything you alway wanted to know about Mimosa Pigra - and then some.