Not Before Time

Friday, October 24

Finally saying a reluctant goodbye to the Kimberley area, we headed back to Katherine. On the way up to Darwin we had spent a couple of days in Katherine but we didn’t do any of the Gorge tours, so this time we were planning on doing the breakfast tour down the gorge.

The Katherine Gorge is 30kms from town, and we’d already decided to stay at the caravan park there due to it’s proximity to the gorge. The park is a nice relaxed bush park, but they have added a great pool since we checked it out on our way north last year – so half an hour after setting up the van we were in the water.

There are lots of birds and wildlife in the area and they are obviously used to people, they come around scrounging for food.

The gorges and the surrounding landscape are of great cultural and ceremonial significance to the local Jawoyn people, who are the traditional owners and custodians of Nitmiluk National Park, and they jointly manage the park with the Parks and Wildlife Commission of the Northern Territory. In Jawoyn, Nitmiluk means place of the cicada “dreaming”.

Katherine Gorge is a series of 13 gorges, created 23 million years ago as water poured along tiny cracks in the earth. The National Park is full of Aboriginal rock art with paintings representing the spiritual dreaming of the Jawoyn people.

During the dry season the gorges become separated by natural dam walls as the water level falls, and you have to park your boat and walk to the next gorge where you get in another boat. However, during the wet season the gorges are interconnected, with the above mentioned dam walls being at least 8 metres under water, and then the boats can cruise from one gorge to another up to the 5th gorge. The tour we went on took in the first 2 gorges and lasted for nearly 3 hours.

Another way of travelling the river is by canoe which is very popular, and during the wet when the water’s high you can canoe right up to the 13th gorge. There are freshwater crocodiles in the gorges, but generally they are shy, or you might see them sunning themselves on the banks (we didn’t see any at all). It’s the start of the wet season there right now which means it’s crocodile nesting season, so all the beaches have signs on them to keep out. There are a couple of photos below showing the beaches, and if you look at the dimples (hollows) in the sand, this is where the crocodiles lay their eggs. It’s very rare to find Saltwater crocs in the gorge – it’s the wrong habitat for them and it’s closely monitored all the time.

I’ve run out of superlatives for this place, it’s just breathtakingly beautiful – so I’ll just put a few photos up for you to look at.

After we left Mt Bundy Station we headed south, detouring to Edith Falls just near Katherine. For some reason we hadn’t stopped there on the way up to Darwin. It’s a beautiful spot, however when arrived there were also 2 buses full of German tourists there. It was very busy.

The plan was to stop somewhere around about Victoria River but somehow we missed the roadside stop so we kept going until we got to Big Horse Creek Camp Ground where we spent the night. Lovely spot right on the river – can’t swim there tho – big crocs call it home.

Going in to WA from the NT means having to go through a fruit and veg checkpoint – I’m glad I’d cleaned out the fridge before we got to the border and made sure we didn’t have any honey so the check went very well. We’d been told by others of really horrible experiences with the inspectors, but we didn’t have any issues at all.

Ok, we’ve got the photo issue sorted out – as you can tell by David’s post below. Like I said in a previous post – I don’t know what all the fuss is about!

Back to the important stuff –

We left Darwin last Saturday and our first stop was a whole hour away – Mt Bundy Station, 3.5kms from Adelaide River township. We met up with Sharon and Barry, friends we met in Tamworth a couple of years ago. They were on their way to Darwin. Barry and Sharon have the same rig as we do and parked both vans under a huge tree and settled in for 3 nights R&R.

Mt Bundy Station is lovely, with lots of trees and shady areas and has plenty of room for caravans and tents, and also offers dorm style and cabin accommodation. It’s also very popular with tour groups, especially eco and safari type tours.

The station runs horse treks and has about 20 horses, as well as buffalo (including babies of both species) and a huge Brahman bull called Nigel who loves visitors feeding him bread and fruit and scratching him behind the ears, but he’s scared of the horses and in fact runs away from them!

There is a huge variety of birdlife in the area such as magpie geese, finches, cockatoos, rosellas, etc, as well as the farm birds – geese, ducks, peacocks.

We went into town a couple of times and visited the war memorial. Adelaide River was the last line of defence against the Japanese when they bombed Darwin during the Second World War, and the war memorial is a lovely tribute to those who died at that time – it’s really sad how young so many of them were.

This is really a test as we were having trouble loading Photos, so I thought this would be a good one to try.
Dave

Once again, I’ve been really slack at updating this site, but to be honest, there hasn’t been very many post worthy events.  However, now that I’m trying to update, we’re having problems downloading photos!  So for now words only will have to suffice.

There is once incident which I should have posted about when it happened and David isn’t very happy with me for not posting about it then, and of course now I can’t show a photo, so it back and use your imagination to see David standing on a boat with a big grin on his face, holding a 1.2m long Jewfish.  Personally I don’t see what all the fuss is about, I did email photos to the world!.  I reckon he only caught it to upstage me!  Mind you, he still hasn’t caught a Barra!

Well, we’ve handed in our notice and will be finishing work next Friday,  September 26, and leaving Darwin on October 4.  We’re going to head to Kunnunnurra in WA for a few weeks and then we’ll head back to Adelaide.  David wants to get some work done on the truck so we’ll check it out in Adelaide, and see when it can be done.  The plan is to leave our van in Adelaide and go to Melbourne for Christmas and catch up with the family and friends for a few weeks then head back to South Australia and hopefully that will be when the truck can be worked on.  Not sure exactly where we’ll head after that – will decide later.  I hope we can catch up with as many of you as possible over the Christmas/New Year period.

We sold the yacht recently, so any fishing right now will be land fishing.  But we’ve decided a new tinny is definitely on the shopping list for next year, one slightly smaller than the one we just had so we can carry it with us.

We’ve been out and about a fair bit lately, doing some tourist stuff such as museums and markets, as well as visiting some of the beautiful areas a couple of hours outside of Darwin. We’ve also been to the Boat Show, the Darwin Show, the V8’s, and a lot of time has been spent catching up with friends for dinner etc.  The weather over the dry season has been beautiful – gorgeous sunny days and (slightly) cooler nights, but it’s now the start of the build up has arrived, although it’s a little bit early.  Some locals are predicting a ‘big’ wet this year, apparently it’s been a while since they have had a big one.  I thought last year was pretty wet, so not sure what a big one entails

We’ve had a great 12 months in Darwin, but we’re both looking forward to getting back on the road – while the time has gone quickly, staying somewhere this long wasn’t part of the plan, at least not at this stage of our travels, there’s just way too much to see to stay too long in one place.  It also wasn’t part of the plan to work so long without a break – 12 months.  We could have stayed in Melbourne and done that!  The upside was that we got to meet a lot of the locals and we’ve made some good friends.

Once we get back on the road I should be updating a bit more frequently – and with photos hopefully