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We arrived in Kunnunura with no more of a plan than to top up food and fuel. However, it is home of a huge reservoir and hence a huge amount of agriculture. So we thought we’d take a punt for some work. Chris was quickly offered a job as chef in a café, thanks to the best reference ever from Ben (cheers mate, we owe you a drink).
We had a few days before Chris started, so we visited Lake Argyle and the grotto a beautiful local swimming area with a waterfall running in. Chris found the café to be a very casual place with a lovely, easygoing boss.
I on the other hand had a job weeding in a sandalwood plantation. I’d like you all to close your eyes and imagine your in the sun, pulling up trees and vine, then times that by 8 hours with no break, add your boss walking behind you hands on hips telling you to speed up, then imagine finding the occasional red back spider in said trees and a vine, there in a nutshell is the job. I am very glad to report that at the end of my first day
Chris had waitress work for me at the café and I never had to do the weeding again! I later found out that some people only last 1-hour weeding so one day wasn’t bad.
And so Chris and I worked together for the first time. We got on fine, the work was easy and the café right on trend as the owner Sue made all of the cakes, ice cream and a lot of the food from produce from her farm. In the end we spent 3 weeks in Kunnunura, in some ways it was a shame we didn’t have longer to work but the town itself was pretty dull, by the end of our time we were both very ready to leave.
Our next stop was Katherine for the famous Katherine gorge. Unfortunately, when we arrived into town it was full of drunk people at 2pm, depressing common for towns in the North of Australia. We decided to pay to camp at the gorge camp complete with swimming pool. The camp was not as good as expected, but following Chris’ mums example we got the camping for half price and a free lunch, result. The gorge itself
was pretty; we found a beautiful crystal clear water hole for a dip.
Next up was Litchfield national park, a really lovely spot full of swimming creeks and rainforest walks. It is also home to some of the hugest spiders I have ever seen that had extended their webs right across the path. They slowed down our walk considerably after Chris nearly took a spider to the face, walking waving a stick in front of you on walks, only in Australia.
All was still interesting as we headed to Bertie’s final destination, Darwin. Our last night sleeping in Bertie we had about 100 mosquitoes in the car as we tried to eat and ended up running away into town.
We had debated for ages going to see the jumping crocodiles, a questionable concept to say the least whereby a tour guide hangs meat off the side of a boat to make the crocodile ‘jump’. We decided we would, as it was the cheapest way to see crocs. It was totally worth it, Chris held a huge python before the boat trip then we saw loads of salties closer than you ever would otherwise jumping with there back
legs clear out of the water, Mum would have hated it.
And then our great last outback day went a bit wrong, turning the corner to the last national park we planned to visit Bertie’s ever-faithful engine dropped out. Coasting to a stop 10km from town but still without phone signal, we flagged down a car to call the breakdown company. The whole saga was long and painful (at least it felt it at the time) suffice to say, Bertie is dead, but we were shown once again that Australians won’t leave anyone in trouble, we had many many people check we were ok and had water. We also had several people go considerably out of their way to help including the mechanic who wouldn’t take any money off us and the local MP who got her brother-in-law to take a look at the car and called hours later to check we were ok.
In the end we had to leave Bertie in Humpty Doo to await the scrapyard truck while we hitched the last 50km into Darwin. Bertie had driven us 34450 km, it would have been nice to make that an even 500 at the end but we don’t feel he owed us anything.
Arriving in Darwin a little more abruptly than expected and owing a few more karma points, we ended up at the worst dive of a hostel either of us has ever seen. It was the only place in town with space, which is how we ended up bumping into, and getting inadvertently drunk with, the woman who was meant to buy our car. We spent our last evening in Darwin eating chips on the wharf as the sun set, not a bad end to our Australian adventure.
That said Australia isn’t quite done with us yet. Although geographically we were closer to Asia in Darwin, you can’t get your visa’s there. So we have backtracked to Melbourne and are currently hoping the Mongolians will get our passports back to us soon. In the mean time we are visiting my Uncle and house sitting for a lovely Kiwi Kath.
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