triplog

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!).

The morning we left Mitchell Plateau, we had issues with the awning, so Jane did some insane rally driving down the Mitchell Falls road - we caught up with Matt and Bec down at the King Edward River campsite where we’d left the trailer, had a quick swim and continued north to the coast at Kalumburu - the very top of WA.

We picked up the permits from town (only just made it in time) and headed out to Honeymoon Bay. The campground there was a major disappointment - only a few nice beach spots (all taken) and the rest of the property looked like a tip - rusting machinery lying around etc. Don’t get me wrong the coastline was nice, but pretty mangrove-y and included a resident four metre salty. We set up camp on a freshly bulldozed bit of ground between the two beach areas - boulders and holes and tree roots everywhere. A bonus of this was we got to use the rocks to make the best camp fireplace ever - any more time there and I would have had the thing including a woodfire pizza oven

We ended up spending a few days here anyway, lazing around, going for walks around the peninsula and fishing - no luck off the beach, I think a boat is needed up here. Food was awesome as usual (we have high standards!), Bec made the best curry ever (!), I did a sambal, and Jane made an incredible camp oven apple crumble.

Camped almost next to us down on the beach were a young couple named Marcus and Yasmine, who were touring around Oz on a catamaran (that’s their cat in the photo above) with two dogs. Pretty hardcore - there’s a lot of remote coastline across the top of Australia, and these guys were extremely self-sufficient, to the point of hunting wild pig and goat with a bow. Nuts but inspiring… and using wind-power to get around is a lot cheaper than diesel.

We left Honeymoon Bay early on 03.08.2008 and had a look at the McGowans Island campsite on the way through - we definitely made the wrong call here. McGowans looked like a complete oasis - campsites nestled amongst little stands of pandanas, clean facilities, no rusting junk lying around and a beautiful bay, rocky shores and beaches.

After Honeymoon Bay and a brief free camp on the Gibb River itself, we pretty much did the last part of the Gibb River Road in one stretch, culminating in the Pentecost River crossing. It’s a pretty spectacular (and wide!) river crossing, but we got it at a time when the water level was pretty low and not running too fast. Crocs frequent this area, so walking the crossing to get a good 4WD photo is not a good idea - Jane’s photos above were taken from the safety of the troopy.