2006/06 Australia trip - Katherine River, Nitmiluk |
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Katherine always seems to be a busy place with lots of traffic compared to the quiet roads around it. The hub of all this activity is, believe it or not, Woolworths. It’s the biggest grocery and liquor store in town and it’s always full of locals, tourists, and the aborigine community. Lots of people picnic in nearby parks, and there are always a couple of dozen kites (hawks) wheeling through the sky looking for unattended food.
We loaded up at Woolworths and drove the twenty miles into the Katherine Gorge section of Nitmiluk national park. I narrowly missed a suicidal wallaby on the way out of town. Probably just came from Woolworths too.
The crashed airplane we saw in 2002 is still there at the side of the road, and a bit deeper in the weeds, but someone’s finally 
removed the big sign next to it that advertised the “sightseeing flight of your life”.
Our first job on getting to the campground was to use the laundry. It seemed a waste of a sunny afternoon, but few campgrounds up north have dryers as a washing line works very well on sunny days. However it doesn’t work well in the evenings, which can be a problem if your only set of sheets is still wet by bedtime.
After finishing the washing we had just enough time to walk along the river and climb the cliff up to the 
Lookout, for a great view of the gorge and the river, and to catch a nice sunset. The only snag of course was that we had to retrace our steps in the dark, but at least I’d remembered to take the headlight this time. Thousands of bats were flying over our heads as we walked back to our camp site.
On our last trip we had spent a day taking a rental kayak up the river. Both of us enjoyed that day, but we weren’t looking 
forward to manhandling the kayaks around the rapids in higher water, so we gave it a miss this time.
Back at the campground we had a few visitors, mainly wallabies wandering around the camper, and sipping water from the leaking irrigation heads.
Wednesday June 28th
The wallabies were back in the early morning, and so was a blue-faced honey eater. I call them “disney birds” as they are cartoon-comical, too funny to be real. This one had seen Sandie put her muesli into a bowl and decided it was bird seed and that he was invited to breakfast.
We spent an hour in Katherine catching up on e-mail and then set off west along the Victoria Highway. This was really the first part of the trip that was completely new to us, so perhaps a good point for me to end part one of the story, after three weeks and some 6000 kilometres or 3600 miles. Part Two will cover our trip through the Kimberley and the Pilbara to the Ningaloo Reef.
Love to you all from Pete and Sandie