Zappa tours

I have just completed my 2nd tour with an adventure tourism company called Zappa tours.  They provide guided storm chasing tours of tornado alley and throughout the Darwin area.  These tours are led by storm savant Clyve Herbert and thunder lover Jane ONeill.  Herbert is Welsh born, Geelong raised and along with ONeill, both are residents of Trentham, Victoria and Hillsboro, Kansas.

Their recent arrival in Darwin on 24 November saw the two veteran chasers not only hungry for storms, but also food, after Jetstar had apparently adopted austere Aeroflot catering practices with not a bite to eat aboard Alan Joyce's model for Australian aviation.  As they neared Darwin, almost on cue, a monster approached Darwin from the east and their inbound flight was diverted to a different path to the Top End capital's airport, while boiling sparking clouds covered the sky over the Northern Territory capital.

Day 2 looked as it offered slim pickings, but on dusk a costal storm cell grew rapidly and teased onlookers as it crossed Fannie Bay.  It was all vertiginous pomp and gust front presaging its passage to the maritime west and north.  In hue it was a mix of pinks, oranges and blues, with smudges of grey and white.  A short lived beast, its bluster and presence whetted the appetites of storm entusiasts lucky enough to watch its passage.  As it disappeared into the dripping wet night, dragon flies danced in delight, while at low tide, mangroves took a breath.  The chasers returned to their 7th floor apartment, cranked up the airconditioning and waited for early morning sparkage in the darkness that they knew was common in the tropical north.

Saturday saw Herbert twiddling the AM car radio dial listening for zaps so we could hunt down an elusive growing storm hidden among the comings and goings of mounds of confusing cumulus.  Eventually it emerged, expanding puffing convection, slowly wending its way across the flat savannah towards Mango farm and Fogg dam.  It provided ephemeral vistas of blues overhead, deep and vivid with curved striations occasionally punctuated by random filaments of electricity that touched earth like a pole held by a blind man feeling his way through the dark.   Arriving, it bought both cool wind and rain as the chasers dashed ahead satisfied with their catch.

Sunday's soup of humidity served up a gruel of weather visiting heat stroke on one of the chasers, who found the skies offered nothing in the form of relief to the low profile of clouds and drippingly high dew points.  Meanwhile, the atomsphere stored up and saved heat and latent energy for another rainy day.

As the following evening approached, with the air again a giant sauna, a failing shower threw warm spots of rain, while we peered at a far away storm more shape than substance, that later provided a light show as the day departed to the west.

Finally on our last day we counted four storms, the first an alarm ringer that shook us from our beds leading to a balcony chase in pyjamas.  Then before morning tea could be had, the view from the wharf gave us almost 180 degrees of a heavy thundery shower giving back evapouration and condensation to the sea from whence they had come.  Two hours later, outback edge country 100 kms to the south held a large thumping collection of wind, rain and lightning that blotted out the sky.  After its best work had been done, the third storm of the day became brilliantly lit by the sun, rendering an indigo shade reminding us where it had been and what it had done,   As our holiday closed, another storm lurked somehwere behind columns of tropical moisture held aloft.  Passing through a veil of rain, we saw it for the first time, rolling along and through the landscape accompanied by low rumbles, another forboding mass shouldering its way westward to an inevitable hydrological destiny.

Another great week in the tropical Top End had unflolded providing us with a stark contrast to our temperate lives in our everyday elsewhere.