Paj and Heather's Big Adventure 2008
Part Six - Top End
We left Kununarra on the 27th of August and crossed into the Northern Territory. The scenery here is quite different with a lot more vegetation and the riverbeds actually have water in them. Most of the rivers we’ve crossed in WA have been dry. We stopped in Katherine for a couple of nights.
We did an evening BBQ cruise on
the Lower Katherine River which was interesting. The cruise left from
the historic Springvale homestead. We had a BBQ on the river bank, fed
some freshwater crocodiles and snapping turtles and did some
spotlighting for crocodiles on the way back to the Jetty.
A cruise up the Katherine Gorge was next on the agenda. It was quite spectacular, although Paj didn’t think it was as impressive as some of the other gorges we have seen. They have all been quite different.
We had a couple of visits to the Katherine Hot Springs. On one of these visits we had a young King Brown snake join us in the water. It is one of the most poisonous snakes in the country. It was trying to get from one side of the stream to the other. We all gave it plenty of room to do what it wanted. It caused quite a stir.
We moved on up to Darwin on August 31st. Here we visited the sunset markets and on another evening had a meal at the food complex at The Wharf. While in Darwin we got the winch plate fixed that had cracked during our travels on the Gibb River. Turns out it wasn’t fitted properly. Darwin is a lot bigger than we expected and there are Thais everywhere.
On the 3rd of
September we moved on to Labelle Downs Station which had been
recommended to us by some others we had met in Kununarra. It is a
working Cattle Station on 1000 sq km with 30,000 head of cattle. They
operate fishing and wildlife charters and a camping area in the dry
season when they are not working the cattle. We stayed a couple of
nights and did the Barramundi fishing charter out on the billabong. We
caught a few barra of varying sizes and lost a few as well. They are
not easy fish to land. We ended up with 4 decent meals out of the 2
largest fish we caught so we were happy.
On route out to the main road we
drove through Litchfield National Park and stopped at Wangi Falls, the
Magnetic Termite Mounds and the Batchelor Butterfly Farm. The Butterfly
Farm was operated by a very colourful, excentric guy.
The humidity at this time of year is really bad. We were really finding it a struggle to cope. It was like being in Thailand. We made the decision to move south without doing Kakadu National Park. Neither of us would be comfortable walking or doing any of the activities in the park so we decided we would go straight down to Alice Springs and keep Kakadu for our next trip and do it at a better time of year.
Next leg – Down the Centre.
