Controversy

This morning I visited the World War 2 Oil Tunnels under Darwin. (To digress: Only last year I learned that during World War 2 the Japanese bombed Australia and even went as far South as Sydney Harbour with some submarines that were destroyed by the Australians.) After Darwin was bombed the Australians decided that they needed to securely store their oil under ground where it couldn't easily be bombed and destroyed by the Japanese, so they hand dug these tunnels. The approval to build them came so late that they were only finished as the war was ending and they were no longer needed. It turns out that it's good that they weren't ever used as they leaked and all of the oil would have been contaminated and useless. There are a lot of pictures of these tunnels in the link below:

I then drove out to Litchfield National Park, where I swam under waterfalls in cool water. Today there were a lot of people around, so I wasn't so scared of the crocodiles. I also looked at some more termite mounds. The ones I have previously posted are called Cathedral Mounds, but the ones I saw today are called Magnetic Mounds because they always face North/South. This is done so that one side of the mound is always in the shade, which is where all of the termites go in the heat of the day to stay cool. There were two theories as to how they know directions either that they can see the sun or that they have some kind of built in magnets. Scientists took a mound to a lab and artificially altered the magnetic field and the termites started to change their existing mound! The mounds also look like tombstones from a distance, which is a bit spooky.

Tomorrow I was planning to go to Kakadu National Park, which is the biggest and best of all of the National Parks in the NT and is the most famous. I have decided that I have Cathedral syndrome, what you get when you go to European cathedral after European cathedral after European Cathedral, only with parks. I have seen enough bushland, termite mounds, waterfalls and aboriginal art. I'm Heading to the East Coast!

Check out all of the pictures from today HERE