Saturday we drove through the park to LaBelle Station for a cruise on McReadies’ Billabong. LaBelle is a working cattle station running around 30,000 head of cattle, they have several billabongs on the property and sea frontage as well. They run fishing and hunting trips (for feral pigs and buffalo) and have powered camp sites and a cottage to rent.
Until the morning of the tour, we were the only ones booked but eventually 10 of us did it which was just a nice number. We had to travel 7ks by 4WD bus through the property to the lagoon, but the bus had a flat battery. The station owner (our guide for the tour) got his Jeep wrangler out thinking he could give the bus a tow-no way, so he called his son (who was out in the helicopter spotting a particular croc that a restaurant in Darwin is building a big and very expensive tank for). He arrived in the helicopter and decided they needed to jump start the bus with the station’s grader. All very entertaining and added another hour to our tour.
We headed out via the enormous cattle yards and after a tour of them (very interesting) and some history of the station we went down to the Billabong. The bus was left running while we cruised on the billabong so the battery could re charge.
The billabong was beautiful, it’s lined with many types of water lilies and other water plants and we saw so many different birds it became hard to count them. The different arms we travelled along were edged with grassland and monsoon rain forest so it was always interesting. We saw lot of crocs-fresh water and salties, a wild pig, and heaps of wallabies resting under trees out of the midday sun.
A Salty Enjoying the Sun
As the big pig waded through the muddy shallows (mud it had created) water birds rode on its back to stay out of the crocs reach. The tour was really quite cheap and we were able to take our own lunch and drinks along which I guess helped keep the price down too.
We finished the day with a swim at Buley Water Holes on the way home. It’s a beautiful spot and even though a couple of busloads of people came and went in the hour we were there, there are lots of holes, so plenty of room for all to swim.
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