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Published: November 30th 2008
25 October - off to the Top End! We set off early from Devil’s Marbles and covered 680k in about 10 hours! Not much to stop for apart from a beer at the Daly Waters pub and easy driving on long straight roads. The Daly Waters pub is pretty quirky with its walls chock full of all kinds of stuff pinned up by travellers over the years - heaps of ID cards, jandals, bras, money, knickers and so on. Got to Mataranka just in time to hear the last of the NPC Final from Wellington (through 2ZB on the computer) - we lost by one point to Canterbury!
We stayed three nights at Mataranka - the Territory Manor caravan park was a really nice place to blob out and relax - very shady, lots of grass, nice pool and very quiet this time of year. The only downside was the noisy peacocks! They go up into the trees at night and call out to each other through the night. We were very lucky to camp next to the lovely Tunstall family at Mataranka and Shaun did some repairs on our caravan for us which has made such a difference -
we can now charge both our batteries off the mains and our water heater works again! Mataranka was made famous by Jeannie Gunn in her classic “We of the Never Never” and we popped along to see the replica Elsey homestead made for the movie, and enjoyed watching the movie which they play at noon every day in the Homestead bar at Mataranka springs. Tried out both Mataranka and Bitter Springs - both refreshing (and free too!). We liked Bitter Springs best as it is more natural with lush tropical plants around the pool. The mineral water is around 28 degrees - perfect for soaking on a hot day and chatting to fellow travellers from around the world. A sunset swim at Mataranka pool was a bit spooky though when hundreds of bats stirred from their daytime slumber and took off over our heads!
Set off for Katherine Gorge - there’s a nice caravan park at the gorge itself, with a huge swimming pool - very welcome on a 40 plus day. Had to time our activities to fit the climate here! We did a short walk to the lookout in the late afternoon and explored the first two
gorges the next morning the easy way - we took the breakfast boat cruise up the gorge at 7am - beautiful. Perfect time to go as by the time we got back at 9am, it was already hot.
Our next stop was Litchfield National Park en route to Darwin - its quite small but there are some really pretty spots to visit. Florence and Wangi Falls are both great for swimming - except the little fish nip at your ankles in Florence! From here, we headed up to Darwin for about 5 days. We met lots of people who said that Darwin would be hot and sticky, as it is “the Build” season - the weather is building up for “the Wet” and every afternoon, dark clouds appear on the horizon but no rain, and the humidity builds up each day. Well it was pretty muggy and hot, but we coped! Thank goodness for air-con! The Free Spirit caravan park was very nice and had a huge resort style pool which helped to keep us cool. There was only one day that we went into meltdown on a visit to the Botanic Gardens - had to admit defeat halfway
round and head back to base. Nice gardens though!
We called into the NT Electoral Office to do our civic duty and vote in the NZ General Election when we arrived - we were numbers 5 and 6 to vote there with 10 days to go before polling day - the staff was quite surprised as they did not expect to have anyone come in!
We also managed to get to the last Mindil Sunset market of the season. Lots of things don’t happen in The Wet up in the Top End, for obvious reasons. They had fireworks down at Mindil Beach to celebrate the final night and there were lots of ethnic food stalls and yummy fruit smoothies - mango smoothies are my favourite. We tried some kebabs from the Road Kill stall - emu, possum, buffalo, camel and crocodile, but we weren’t particularly impressed.
Had the caravan brakes repaired while in Darwin - apparently they were a bit of a mess so good thing we had them checked. Visited the Darwin museum - they have a very interesting section on Cyclone Tracy which devastated Darwin on Christmas Day 1974 (71 people died in the cyclone).
And they also have “Sweetheart” who is supposed to be the biggest crocodile ever captured (don’t worry, he is stuffed now). Darwin has lots of interesting history and we didn't realise how extensively it was bombed during World War II. During the war, Darwin was bombed 59 times! The most extensive raid took Darwin by surprise on 19 February 1942, when over 200 people were killed and 8 ships were sunk in Darwin Harbour. More bombs were dropped on this day than on Pearl Harbour. We think it was kept pretty quiet during the war. Around the civic centre, there are several plaques commemorating historic events, including the shell of the old Town Hall damaged by Tracy. We popped into Parliament House which is very modern as NT has only had self-government since 1978. We also visited the WWII Oil Storage tunnels which were built but never used, and the East Point Military museum, which pretty much wrapped up our Darwin WWII history lessons.
We had a wonderful day out at the Territory Wildlife Park - we thought twice about going as we had been to the Desert Park at Alice - but they were quite different. Visiting both
parks highlighted to us how very diverse the Northern Territory is, the dry arid deserts of Central Australia are a complete contrast to the wet tropical Top End. The NT park has a wonderful aquarium section complete with Graeme, a huge salt water croc you can get really up close and personal with! The nocturnal house there is the best we have ever seen (and we have seen a few!) and we were lucky to get a cuddle from an orphan black-footed wallaby who is being hand reared by one of the keepers.
On our last night in Darwin we decided to try out the seafood buffet at the Casino which turned out to be a feast and great value at $21.95. Headed off the next day to Kakadu National Park, stopping at Humpty Doo (yes, it is the name of a town!) on the way to have a flutter on the Melbourne Cup, but didn’t manage to pick any winners. It is around 200ks out to Jabiru, the main settlement in the park, so we based ourselves there for 2 nights. The Jowali visitors centre was excellent and we watched a very good video on “The Wet” in
their air-conditioned theatrette. We drove out to Ubirr, stopping at the East Alligator river on the way. This is a great place to spot crocs - the river is full of them - and we watched in amazement at Cahill’s crossing as people risked their lives walking down into the water to photograph them!! Ubirr is an awesome place, there are amazing aboriginal rock paintings around the base of the rock and you can climb up onto Ubirr and watch the sunset over the wetlands of Kakadu - magic!
We called into Nourlangie Rock on our way down to Cooinda, just a short drive from Jabiru. Nourlangie was also impressive with more amazing ancient rock art and interesting views over the Kakadu escarpment. We stayed the night at Cooinda so we could do the early morning boat trip on Yellow Water. It was $40 a night for a caravan site there, the most we have paid so far on this trip! However it was a nice shady park with two swimming pools and close to Yellow Water. It was the best time to do the boat trip (6.30 start!) as the birds and the crocs were very active -later
in the day it is too hot and they all disappear at this time of the year. The trip was quite expensive but well worth it - the billabongs were very still and peaceful and we saw about 40 crocodiles both in and out of the water and many varieties of waterbirds, native birds and even sea eagles!
There is also an excellent cultural centre near Cooinda, which has well presented displays of aboriginal culture and traditions and an entertaining video on “bush-tucker”. On our way out of the park we went out to Gunlom, a beautiful waterhole surrounded by pandanus plants, where some of Crocodile Dundee was filmed. We really enjoyed Kakadu as it is an interesting mix of scenery, wetlands, wildlife and Aboriginal culture. It would be great to visit after the Wet, as this time of the year many of the waterfalls are just trickles.
Our next overnight stop was at Edith Falls, just north of Katherine. The national park campground was nice but had no power, so we had a pretty warm night without A/C. The main waterfall was dry, but the smaller falls were still running, and the pools were very great for
Cathedral Termite Mound
in Litchfield National Park swimming with crystal clear water and no crocs. The walk to the Upper Pool was only 2.6k and well worth the climb.
We spent the next night just down the road at Katherine, as we wanted to make sure we could get broadband reception so we could listen to the NZ Election results. We got pretty good coverage through 2ZB Live. Katherine has “hot” springs right in the middle of town. They are not actually hot, they are natural mineral springs about 28 degrees, like Mataranka, and refreshing on a very warm 40+ Katherine day.
It was good to wake up to an overcast sky the next day - we even had a few spits of rain! We drove through some magnificent country around the Victoria River and stopped to do a walk up the sandstone escarpment for some great views. Camped at Big Horse Creek, a small roadside area which we had all to ourselves - the roads being very quiet now. We were now almost in WA and saw our first boab tree - these unusual trees are only found in the Kimberley region from the border to Broome. We stopped to visit a very old
and famous bob, the Gregory Tree, where the intrepid explorer Augustus Gregory and his men set up camp in 1885. You can see the dates they arrived and left the area carved into the boab tree. Unfortunately, people still do this today, so a lot of the bigger trees near the highway are spoilt by graffiti.
Well we have finally made it back to Western Australia - we crossed the border into WA on November 10 - almost exactly nine months since we left the state for SA. Quite exciting to be back in Blu’s home territory!
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