Day 19

---

Did NOT have a good night’s sleep last night, the caravan park we are staying at is home to the local colony of bats. They are absolutely enormous with wing spans of a metre! Its pretty cool at dusk because they all set off looking for food and the sky is full of them but then at around one or two o’clock in the morning they come back to the trees and just screech and make this weird giggly type noise; they sound like gremlins! The wildife here is pretty cool though, we have had to stop in the street to let dragon lizards cross, the sky is full of all different types of parrots - all different assortments of colour (but, again, they can be noisy too), there are loads of fish in the sea, and when we drive along we see loads of different eagles and birds eating the dead kangaroo carcasses, and of course we see kangaroos (both live ones and those with a death wish!). So anyway after a rough night we headed down to the hot springs and they really were gorgeous, it was very small and thin and about 30 degrees so we had a paddle and then headed out to Katherine Gorge. The gorge was magnificent, it took about 20mins to climb and it was bloody hard work and tiring but at the top it was totally worth it - we could see for miles and miles and people were canoeing down below us. Unfortunately, because of the crocs, we couldn’t swim in the river so we headed back to the caravan site and spent some time by the pool and read our newly acquired books that our neighbour had kindly given us. Tomorrow we head for Kakadu National Park and we will cross over the border to the Northern Territory!

---