Before completely leaving the Kimberley behind I have to mention my little washing day incident. It had been a few weeks since we’d managed to find time to wash our clothes so I had about 3 loads of washing to get through in Kununurra and whilst loading tonnes of dirty clothes into one of the machines I dropped a pair of underpants between the washing machine and the clothes dryer. I stuck my hand in between the machines to pick up the undies and grabbed onto something smooth and scaly. As you can imagine I jumped back screaming like a girl and very cautiously peeked into the gap where there was a huge blue tongue lizard that was now proudly wearing my undies as a hat. As far as I know he’s still running around the hotel with my undies on his head… I decided to let him keep them!
Ah, but anyway… onto Katherine, which was to be our home for the next few days. We arrived in town and were surprised to discover that Katherine was actually a decent sized town. There were cafes and supermarkets and even mobile phone service which was a nice treat after several weeks of being out of range. We said goodbye to Remi who was off to find a ride to Darwin then we located the venue we were playing at and made our way inside to introduce our selves to the staff and get acquainted with the place. Walking into the Katherine Hotel for the first time was like walking straight into a Footrot Flats comic… a stereotypical small town bar in the Northern Territory. The front bar where we would be playing was a large smoke filled space with a handful of poker machines in one corner and a bar filling the entire length of one wall. The outback bar was obviously designed to be hosed out at the end of a messy night and this morning was filled with patrons milling about sipping form cans of light beer. The Katherine Hotel only served light beer until midday, and the bottle shop didn’t open til 2pm so we decided to pull up some stools and kill half an hour absorbing the atmosphere until we could reward ourselves with a nice Coopers on tap. We came to realise pretty quickly that top-enders are generally tougher than us city dwellers. When striking up a conversation with a Territorian you can pretty much guarantee that they’ll throw some great stories at you… particularly if you’re a first time tourist to the top end. Obviously with our fascination for Crocs we received countless tales of these prehistoric predators and their penchant for reigning terror among people and animals alike and we were told we had to go for a boat ride on Adelaide River if we wanted to check it out for ourselves.
One of the highlights from our time at the Katherine Hotel was morning Karaoke which occurred every Thursday and Friday and was predominately patronised by the aboriginal community. We were treated to some great all in sing-a-longs of pub classics like Hotel California and Sweet Home Chicago - not to mention some brilliant dancing and generally happy vibes.
We spent 3 nights in Katherine, camping in the backyard of a backpacker hostel run by a guy named Coco and his mate Tony. We got to chat with some interesting characters that were also passing through for one reason or another, like Yvonne who was a German woman who lived in Argentina and spent several months each year residing in an Aboriginal community 2 hours down the road and had some wonderful tales of her travels. We almost joined her on her mission out to the community to stay a night or two but when we found out we’d have to take on 30k’s of dirt road and cross a creek to get there we thought better of it.
We also met a guy named Taffy who lived in Katherine with his wife Noreen and ran boat tours through the Katherine Gorge. Taffy was a great big rugged Northern Territorian Santa Claus of a man and after chatting to him for a bit he invited us to come down to the gorge and jump on a tour gratis.
The Katherine Gorge is definitely a must do if you’re in this part of the country, it is so immense and breathtakingly beautiful and we even got to see our first real life crocodile in the wild, an apparently harmless yet still menacing freshwater croc measuring in at about 2.5 metres. Unfortunately today was the day that my camera finally ran out of battery after losing my charger somewhere many kilometres back down the road so I missed out on capturing it in the photographic realm. On the boat tour Taffy introduced us to his mate Brian from Darwin who said he’d show us around once we got into town and on the walk back to the car after jumping off the boat we all got a special little bush tucker lesson from Noreen who picked berries off bushes here and there for us to eat, pointed out the wild mint which apparently makes a great cuppa and as a grand finale reached into a tree to pull down a green ants nest which she crushed up in her hands and held out for us smell – a very strong, sharp smelling almost concentrated eucalyptus-esque scent which was supposed to be brilliant for fixing colds and flues. We also had to taste the green ants themselves so we picked a couple from the thousands that were crawling up her arms and bit off their tales which exploded a sweet yet sour liquid into our mouths.
So Katherine was good to us. The gig was great fun with a lot of local crew (the ones that didn’t go camping, fishing or hunting) coming along and making it fun for all and by the time we did roll out of town we’d become quite fond of the place and it's endless array of interesting characters. Next stop: the city lights of Darwin!
