triplog

You know those picture-perfect, tropical clichés? Sunset over the ocean through the coconut palms and all that jazz? Well, that’s what we’re living with at the moment.

Bec had been told of a great pub with a beer garden overlooking the water in Karumba, on the Queensland side of the gulf. It’s a tiny fishing hamlet a mere 70kms detour off the Savannah Way, just past Normanton, and since 70 klicks is no obstacle in the pursuit of a cold beer and a good view, off we went.

We got here yesterday afternoon just in time to see the sun sink below the horizon, then turned our attention to the pub menu and more beers - when in Rome etc etc, so XXXX on tap it was, with massive slabs of steak*, copious prawns and chips. As it turns out, this place really is a fishing mecca, with a thriving prawn fishery as well - this news of course made Janes day, so lunch today was a mountain of fresh prawns, and tomorrow we’re hiring a tinny to try our luck at fishing.

* Yes, if anyone was paying attention there, I’ve cracked and fallen off the vegetarian bandwagon (to mix metaphors). And in case you’re wondering, I like a steak bloody - still mooing, if needs be

Will this hardship never end?

:)

We camped at Daly Waters pub last night - its about 275kms south of Katherine. Jane and I got here late in the evening (again), we stopped off at the Katherine swimming pool for Jane to swim some laps and I went for a skate at what was a pretty well built skate bowl (but full of rubbish and leaf litter).

Daly Waters is a bit of an Aussie pub institution - established by the Pearce family in the 1920s as a rest stop for travellers on the north/south route, it experienced a boom in the 1930s when it actually became an international airport - it was used as a refuelling depot for international flights heading for the east coast via Singapore. During WWII it became an Allied airbase and was used as a staging post for American bombers. Post-WWII it entered a bit of a decline before re-emerging on the tourist and truckie routes as a nice rest spot - having cold beer on tap can’t hurt either. The current pub was built in 1930 and is now heritage listed.

The photo above shows a flock of rainbow lorikeets having a shower in the spray from the sprinkler - they were hilarious, all screeching when the sprinkler passed over them, then flying off into the trees to shake themselves off, before coming back for another round.

Today we leave Darwin, on our way out through Kakadu and Arnhem Land towards the Coburg Peninsula. Overall Darwin is a really relaxed kinda place - there’s some cool stuff to do - highly recommend Mindil Markets on a Thursday night (awesome street food), and a sunset drink in the beer garden of the Ski Club (waterskiing, not snow, obviously). Wish we could have spent longer here, but we have a schedule to keep

On our way out we stopped for pies at Tommos Pies just outside Darwin - fantastic. And no fancy claims about being the ‘worlds greatest pie’ or anything, just really well made Aussie pies.

Anyways, I may be out of range again for a while - we’re gonna spend a week up in Coburg, then make our way back down through Kakadu and across the gulf towards Queensland.

Woah! I’m freakin’ up to date!!!

As I mentioned in this post, I’ve had a massive gap (almost 2 months) of not being able to update this site on a regular basis, so I decided to backdate all the entries starting from when we left Broome up until now (we’re in Darwin). If you want to read them in order, click here to jump back to the start of the backdated entries and just use the “next post” link at the top of the page to move through them all sequentially until you get to this post.

We got to Darwin a few days ago, and have been running around doing the usual town chores (repairs, new tyres for troopy etc) - but also, as luck would have it, we got here right in time for the Darwin festival. So we’ve had the opportunity to go out and see some festival stuff - we saw a deckchair cinema flick - Children of the Silk Road - and caught a performance by a Korean percussion group which was just amazing.

Tonight we went to the Mindil Markets, which are held every week on the beach in Darwin - and caught up with Kath, who’s in town for a conference. The markets were pretty cool, some good stuff and a lot of the usual market fare - but the food is fantastic. A massive amount of choice including some authentic Indonesian/Malay street cuisine - I ate myself stupid, starting with some fried prawn dumplings and spring rolls, a mango lassi as a palette cleanser, then a nasi lemak (Eva, this one’s for you!).