ADVENTURE
Shady Shangri-la
Exquisite beauty and boys-own adventure are butted side-by-side in the Top
End, where the lily-clad Shady Camp Billabong meets the murky undercurrent
of
Sampan Creek.
Story and photos Don Fuchs
Half past six in the morning and the sky is pastel with opaque hues of pink and watery blue. The air is filled with noise – a flock of white egrets, determined to greet the morning and wake everyone up; a blue-winged kookaburra, trying to laugh but ending up in hysterics. In the billabong crocodiles are floating in the water like logs in a rain-swollen river. A jabiru struts along the banks, looking for fish, frogs: breakfast. Two juvenile jabirus, dirty-looking and not yet displaying the vivid colours of the adults, are getting involved in a dispute with a large, dancing pelican. Fish are jumping. It is a scene out of an Attenborough documentary, one of those sequences where you think, 'how on earth did they manage to get that?'. Only it is not television; not edited, cut, presented and put together for dramatic proposes – this is real life. And it's a typical morning at Shady Camp Billabong.
This billabong is part of the Mary River in the Top End of the Northern
Territory. Flanked by the two cattle stations – Melaleuca Station on the
Shady Camp
side and Marrakai Plains Station on the opposite side – it is protected
as a nature reserve and managed by Northern Territory Parks and Wildlife.
Shady
Camp Billabong is a nature-lovers paradise and is Wayne Turner's favourite
spot. Wayne, 36, lanky and almost two metres tall with short, cropped,
salt-and-pepper hair, runs Aussie Overlanders and Gondwana Adventure Tours
and Expeditions
in Darwin. Both companies offer two-to-five day backpacker tours to Kakadu
National Park and into Arnhem Land. Shady Camp is part of some itineraries,
with guaranteed crocodile sightings on a sunset cruise thrown in. "It's
the icing on the cake of my tours," he says. 
Full story Issue 32, Dec 2003/Jan 2004
