Katherine a.k.a drunken BO town.

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We finally reached the small town of Katherine in the afternoon of Matt's birthday. It was quite fun to see all the abo's staggering around in the shopping centre car park and get out of the car to hear the music the large street-speakers play to all of them presumably to entertain them and try to prevent them fighting in their drunken boredem.
We were pretty astonished to find that everyone in town seems to know everyone else...the first guy Matt spoke to could tell us exactly where our mate from Asia 'Cat' was working despite the fact all we could tell him was she worked in a bar and was from England. But we located her and arranged to go to hers sometime during the week to catch up and eat dinner.
We were pretty shocked to see our accommodation for the week, it was shall-we-say a little smaller than the apartment we had been accustomed to. We had a single cabin with an outdoor bathroom...! monique's bed was at one end, ours at the other the kitchen along one side and the dining table along the other..put it this way..no-one had to walk very far to do anything and we never had to shout to tell each other dinner was ready!!
One exciting part was seeing a very rare banded tree snake..unexpected sighting in the dark and it was very long and very active..we didn't know what it was but Matt ruched in for the camera and chased it..took the shots and then stamped his feet to try and move it away from where Monique was sitting in the car on the phone. after looking it up on the internet we realised this perhaps wasn't the best idea as apparently they can be bad tempered and rarely come down from trees..may strike repeatedly if threatened although it's venom is pretty mild.

Work-wise it was a pretty hard week, we managed to get pretty good numbers but the whole week was punctuated by the strong smell of Body Odour and alcohol. Not pleasent when you are in a hot and sticky environment.Hard to explain the whole situation to people who didn't really understand english either but all had good fun trying. Scariest part of the week definately had to be watching a big drunken abo lady with CRAZY hair steal a very large kitchen
knife from the supermarket, rip the packaging off with her teeth and chase the person she was arguing with brandishing it. The security guard, Matt and the supermarket manager plus assorted abo's followed her and the situation was diffused in a matter of seconds..thankfully no injuries..just your average drunken day in Katherine!

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