20th July 2012
We continue north and call in at Elsey National Park, we have been told to go to the hot spring here. We always do as we are told and are not disappointed! A short walk, on a very hot day, leads us to a beautiful lagoon, where, as promised the water is warm. Spend about 30 minutes in the water, trying to do as much swimming as possible, the whole excerise thing is a bit of a problem, when you are sat in a camper, nearly all day, everyday! (missing walking the Baz and Hector!).
Anyway, onto Katherine, one of the biggest towns we have seen for a while (pop 5850!). Pop into the 'I' site to buy our passes for Kakadu N.P. $25 each. I have noticed a big sign on the way into town, that there is a show on. We ask about it, the Rodeo is in town!! How exciting! We hadn't really intended stopping so early, but decide to find a campsite and go to the show. Find a site a few km's outside town.
Driving over a small river, we hear lots of noise. Matt notices 'fruit bats' in the trees above, 100's of them! Nice to see!!
The show has a few craft stalls, lots of crappy kids toy stalls and a fun fair, plus an areana with horse stuff going on and then we have the real entertainment, cowboys (and girls) 'trying' stearing bulls through a course. This was all very entertaining until one cowboy was trying to round his bull up, and the bull ran head on into the metal fence, and didn't get up again!! Netty is not happy. When the organisers realised it wasn't going to get up, 4 men dragged it out of the areana and left it, to die! Can you imagine that happening at the Burwarton show, it would be closed down!
The evening brought the kids out, riding bullocks and bucking horses, doing their bit to entertain. Actually, it's more than entertaining, there is quite a bit of money involved for the winners, not to mention the tittle of being Katherine's Rodeo winner! They take it all very seriously and travel all over the country. The evening goes down hill rapidly, when the so called, 'enterainment' arrives in the form of 2 sisters, wearing big pink sparkly 'chaps' and and waistcoats, who call themselves the 'Crack up Sisters', if they stuck to what they did best, 'cracking whips', it would of been fine, but the jokes were terrible! Glad to get back to the campsite, to watch the wallabys hopping around!
On to Kakadu, the landscapes becomes more hilly and windy, but the roads are suprisingly good still. There is a lot more 'wetland' here, so the wildlife is more noticable. Our first river stop, we take a 'boardwalk' walk. There are a lot of signs warning of the crocodiles in the wetland areas, so it is really important to stick to these types of walks, anyway, within the first 2 minutes, we spot one! Quite big, but really not that far out, it is definately a good warning, not to go to near the waters edge!!
To be fair, there is not a awful lot to see or do in Kakadu unless you have a 4 x 4. A lot of the main waterfalls are a couple of hours drive down gravel roads, again, not ideal in a hired camper! But we make the most of the shorter walks, (as it is to hot to walk to far, during the day) and look at all the 'Rock Art', God knows what some of them were on, when they were doing this so called 'Art'! They say some of it dates back 20,000 years. We have lunch next to a Billabong and find a campsite with 'en-suite' bathrooms, how smart is that?!
We watch sunset on the top of Ubirr, which has a 380 degree view over wetlands on one side and hills & trees on the other, not to mention the bush-fire that is raging in the distance!
Almost forgot to tell you about the termite mounds. Bloody enormous!! We went to one place where there were 100's of 'magnetic' mounds, they looked like head-stones, all tall but narrow, facing the same direction. Apparently, they build them facing north to south, something to do with the direction of the sun, keeping them cool and protecting them in the weh season! The other one's are called cathedral mounds!!
Tomorrow we head to Darwin, as the camper has to be back for the 26th. It should take us about 3 hours to get there.
