To Katherine

Friday 20th June 2008

Somehow we didn’t seem to be very quick at packing up today – I think we were all a little sad to be saying goodbye to the Stanleys who we are unlikely to catch up with again.

We made a brief stop in town to look in an Aboriginal art gallery and found some of the same artists who had work at the Warmun Art Gallery but no pictures we liked more than the one we’d bought there (isn’t that lucky!).

We had a long drive ahead of us (over 500km) so we were keen to get on but we did stop for a photo op at the Northern Territory border and at Victoria River (past Timber Creek but still in the Gregory National Park) to do an escarpment walk. When we checked out the sign we found it was a 3km hike up a steep hill and the girls’ interest plummeted but we did manage to persuade them part of the way up and made it to a lookout with a decent view of the Victoria River and Victoria Highway.

We trundled into Katherine at about 4:30 where I’d picked out the Riverview Caravan Park for its proximity to some thermal springs. Having paid our money we weren’t too impressed as we drove to our site – one row back from the main road where we could hear trucks and dodgy exhausts going past on a fairly regular basis. A check of the showers confirmed a slight grottiness – joy! Well, it’s only for two nights...

To give us all a little exercise for the day we did a walk down to these Thermal Springs that had caused me to ignore a recommendation for another caravan park. We didn’t take bathers because it was close to dark but we did dip our toes in and it looks promising for tomorrow.

Coming back into the park I checked out the other set of showers and they are infinitely superior so that’s where I’ll be going... Since we were still on WA time and it didn’t feel late to us we did a drive round town in the hope of finding a fish and chip shop but it seems the good people of Katherine don’t care for fish so we went home and fed for ourselves from the store cupboard.