Rick and Rae's Travels: Sun, 10th to Tues, 12th July

We woke at 5:30am to the sounds of birds and the helicopter warming up for the day. It gets moved it to the front of the service station during the day for advertising purposes. We packed up and drove approx 350kms to Katherine. We had been advised via a friend of a friend not to stay in the township of Katherine as you a liable to wake up and find all your wheels missing! We decided instead to head out to Katherine Gorge. We had to say goodbye to the others as they both have dogs and Katherine Gorge is in a National Park.

When we arrived we discovered that the advertised price of $33 per night for a site was in fact $39 per night so we weren't impressed. We did find out later though, that it was free to use the washing machines. We were sent to an area of drive through sites set aside for large vehicles and found it full of 'whizz bangs' (small campervans) and trailer tents ... once again not impressed, as we had a bit of difficulty getting in and around the log barriers, etc. Fortunately Rick is an expert at putting the van in tight spots. At least we have mobile phone and internet but no TV.

We visited the information centre and booked a cruise through two of the four gorges for Monday afternoon. We went for a swim in the pool and later caught up with the washing as the machines were free. Rick cooked some beautiful roast lamb for dinner.

On Monday we rose early as there were a couple of extremely noisy kids nearby, and spent the morning catching up on cleaning, etc. Late in the afternoon we walked down to the cruise boat for our guided tour down the Gorge. On the way to the boat, we came across trees full of fruit bats ... all screeching and carrying on. We were advised by our cruise guide not to stay too close to them as they tend to drop ticks.

The Katherine Gorge is beautiful. It actually consists of three gorges, but we chose to only cruise through two which took us 2 hours. The Gorge was closed to canoes, etc because due to the unusually heavy wet season there was the possibility of salt water crocs being in the river. There were signs on all the lovely sandy beaches warning to stay away as they are croc nesting areas. Along the way we saw traps set to catch the salties.

Later in the evening we spoke briefly to a lady setting up camp across from us ... if you could call it that! She was setting up her bedding on top of a picnic table in the open, as she was travelling alone and couldn't be bothered setting up her tent. The poor woman woke the next morning to find that the roaming wallabies had managed to get into all her food in the back of her Subaru Brumby and spread it all over the ground ... what a mess!! The wallabies know exactly how to get at food. People camped next to us wandered over to the showers, leaving a plastic container on their outdoor table. Rick and I watched as a wallaby wandered over and had a bit of a sniff around. Rick managed to scare it away just as it knocked the container to the ground ... fortunately the lid stayed on.

We had a bit of a sleep-in on Tuesday before packing up and heading about 50kms further up the road to Edith Falls. It costs $18 per night to camp there but there weren't many sites and they were all way too small for our rig ... and they wouldn't take EFTPOS either. We had a look at the swimming hole and falls and decided to keep going.

We stopped at Pine Creek and prepared our own lunch in the van. The food is nearly always much nicer that way! As we walked around the van we noticed there were 4 squashed and dried out cane toads on the road ... thankfully we didn't come across any live ones.

After lunch we kept heading north to Adelaide River and checked into the showgrounds there for $10 per night which included water but no power. We also had some TV reception. The showgrounds were adjacent to the main railway line between Adelaide and Darwin, so at around 5pm we watched the Ghan heading north. We had been advised by different people along the way that due to school holidays, all the parks in Darwin would be full so we decided to try to book ahead. We had no trouble, and booked into the Big 4 park at Howard Springs which is about 25kms south of the city.