Day 70

Day 70 Katherine

We left Timber Creek at 9:30 local time. It is not too bad with the daylight saving of adding 1 ½ hours as it is hot and you are getting up when it is still slightly cool – 32C. as per usual, we were the last to leave and headed off. The price of LPG here was $1.68l so I took a few to make sure and hit

Julie, any relation?

the road. My intention was to stop at Victoria River Roadhouse to get fuel there but as we drove towards it there was a sign 5kms before it and we were past it before we saw it. It is set back off the road and no signs! Katherine was just 200kms away so we drove on. When we spoke to Maureen’s mum, Lesley later, Victoria Crossing was where she and Phil stayed when the shooter was up here. About 25 odd years ago a German tourist decide he would go around shooting campers and the police gathered travellers up at strategic locations like Victoria River and when a few days passed, convoyed them into Kununurra. They eventually spotted the guy and he was shot, but it was all a bit frightening at the time.

The drive was uneventful but very picturesque. There is one section where you have the river on one

Girt and Trude ready for action

side and this tall cliff on the other. The roads are a bit different in that they do not have much of a verge, the speed limit is 130 and I don’t know if it is connected to the speed, but there are heaps of dead wallabies everywhere. We have seen more dead ones today than we have seen all the trip so far. We had looked up parks to stay and there was a Big 4 listed here so we decided that was for us as we are members. We did not know where it was, it cannot be that hard to find, we will just call into the info boards on the outside of all towns and they usually have a map of town with them listed, no problems. Well apparently you don’t need to show where the parks are, you just list them with their addresses but don’t put street names anywhere and you will magically find them. The frightening thing was is that we had a brochure from the Tourist Centre from Katherine the we picked up on the way and its town map listed all the parks but did not show them and the one we were looking for, there was no street name shown. We drove along further and there was a helicopter

Durack monument Timber Creek

company Northern Australia Helicopters and they had ten helicopters there and we were ogling them when Maureen said she saw a sign referring to some river crossing that she recognised from the internet when we looked the park up. So we stopped and turned off the road and into this side road and drove down it to the Low-Level Crossing and on the far side there was a road sign and under it was this tiny sign saying Big 4. Sure enough, it led to our park. Beautiful grounds and layout and we are one of about 10 campers there.

We were directed to our spot which was near the ablutions and setup. We decided that whilst we were still moving we would go into the Tourist Centre and find out about all there was to see. Katherine is very spreadout along the main road and we had to drive the whole length before we got there and that was fatal as we had to go past a Target and a shopping centre! At the centre Maureen

Durack monument Timber Creek

went in to get the information whilst I waited, she came out with a swag of brochures and looking very confused. She handed me the map and said she had no idea what the lady said. The map was covered in circles and crosses, but nothing written on them. Some were for spots to see ad others were those that were closed, but they were exactly the same! The map was no good either as there were no markings where the tourist spots were that it references in the words, they did not even have a grid set up on it as references.

We retired to the shopping centre where I grabbed the stuff and had a coffee whilst my little shopaholic buzzed around the mall getting her shop fix. I had made a bit of a list of things to see and there are a lot of things to see, when I spotted Peter and Tracy walking past the coffee shop. They came in to say hello and Peter had just been to the Info Centre and had the same map I had with the same scrawls and he also had no idea what it all meant.

We finished our shopping and returned to Girt. As it was close to sunset, we wandered down to the pool for a swim. The pool is huge but the water was quite warm but refreshing. As the sun went down, all these bats came out. They are not fruit bats but big normal bats. They are about the size of 2 open hands. There were some smaller ones about the size of one hand, I must look them up. There is a push on at the moment about not touching them as they have a rabies like infection that can kill you, so hands off, looking with our eyes and not our hands.

Chillin' before shower

We just had tea and are sitting outside Girt enjoying the evening. We have made bit of a list of things we want to see, some in the books, others we saw as we passed on the road in like the old WWII airbase just out of town, not mentioned anywhere!