Where beautiful contradictions abound: Kakadu National Park in the wet

Over this past weekend I was lucky enough to spend an hour or so over parts of Kakadu National Park – and also above the Ranger uranium mine. What impressed most were the contrasts between the ugly glory that is the Ranger mine – smack in the middle of Kakadu – and the landscape that surrounds it.

We’ve had what locals call a “dry wet” but it seems finally to be getting itself into gear. We had some lovely late afternoon monsoonal storms and sunny mornings over the weekend and it was a great trip – no less so because of the trip home to Darwin through one of the wildest rain and thunder storms I’ve seen in many a year.

Here is what I saw through my windscreen for much of that drive.

As I write a few days later Darwin is bunkering down for the expected blast of the unnamed cyclone that hovers a few hundred kilometres to our south west. You can see more about that event at the BoM site here.

This we saw..

The mine has it’s own beauties. But then we moved on to better places.

This is a land defined by water and the rivers that carry it.