Australia 3

Looking into the cockpit from the living cabin

Our 1st stop was a small town about 30km from Darwin where we stocked up on supplies from the supermarket.

Adelaide River (119km) is a town that played an important part in the defence of Darwin in WW2 and still does with disused airfields still in evidence along the road. It was still a public holiday and the local railway historians were holding an open day at the old railway station. Outside, a guitar player was singing old time outback songs and we enjoyed our brief stop and chat with the folks there.

The river runs under the road here and we took a couple of pictures whilst peering out looking looking for "freshies" - alas we were disappointed.The next place that attracted our attention was Pine Creek - an arid barren but typical NT style small town that had once been famous for gold mining. It was here that we caught our first glimpse of a dingo. It was in the main street and was eying up a local mongrel with both standing off.

Katherine was beckoning - it was 320km from Darwin and we were looking forward to trying out our first caravan park / camp site complete with power supply for the air conditioning and other comforts of home.
The name of the camp was "Shady Lane's" holiday camp and lived up to its reputation for supplying shady sites with a concrete pad. We liked it here and stayed 2 nights because the Katherine Gorge was on the same road about 15km away. There was a swimming pool here and another feature of the camp was it's direct access to a crocodile infested river about 300 metres from our camp site. It was here that we learnt a lot about the difference between freshies and salties.

Katherine Gorge or Nitmiluk as it is known by the Aborigines is one of those places we had come to see, so on day 2 we booked a 4 hour afternoon tour.
We travelled by flat bottomed aluminium boat through 4 gorges having left each boat at the end of each gorge and walked to the next gorge and the next boat.
At number 4 gorge, we climbed up a rocky track to a waterfall cascading into a lovely clear pool where everyone was invited to have a swim. There was nowhere to hide oneself to change so everyone just pretended they were the only one present and got on with it. I didn't see anyone looking embarrassed. Refreshments consisted of a couple of pieces of cake and a cool fruit drink made from the waterfall and powder carried by the boat skipper.