Katherine

We had another long drive to get to Katherine from Tennant Creek, nearly 700km, which is a long way when you are towing a van and averaging around 90kph. We had originally planned to break it up into 2 days travel, but the choices of places to stop are so limited we decided to just bite the bullet and get it over and done with. We've now had a week here to recover.

The thing that is so obvious coming from central Australia is how much greener everything is here. It is now the dry season, so there isn't even the hint of a shower, but they get enough rain during the wet to last them all year. The caravan park has grass sites instead of red dirt, and there are hardly any flies (thank Heavens). Top temperatures have been around 30, and night time has been going down to high teens (as opposed to 4 and 5 overnight at Alice Springs). The tourist season is obviously in full swing, we are staying at one of 10 caravan parks in town and it is bustling. Katherine is not only a major stop on the trip North-South, but also on the East-West route, we'll be coming back through here in a couple of months on our way to Western Australia.

The main attraction in town (apart from seeing grass) is Katherine Gorge (Nitmiluk). We spent a full day there, doing the clifftop walk in the morning and going on a 4-hour boat cruise in the afternoon. When we booked the cruise we didn't realise that in fact it was three boat cruises - Katherine Gorge is actually 13 gorges with rocky rapids separating them - our cruise covered 3 gorges, which meant that at the top of each we had to disembark and walk to the next boat waiting in the next gorge. Apparently in the wet season the river can rise many metres, covering the rocks, they use a speedboat then to do the cruises as the usual riverboats wouldn't have enough power to battle against the river in flood. The cruise was spectacular, with not only magnificent scenery but quite a few freshwater crocodiles lazing on the riverbanks. The 'freshies' aren't the crocs that eat people, that's 'salties', which are much bigger and meaner. They get salties in the gorge during the wet season, and it wasn't yet guaranteed that they'd all been cleared out, so there was no swimming in the gorge. We didn't have to be told twice!

We also went to Edith Falls, which had a stunning walk, and Cutta Cutta Caves, which had an interesting guided tour, including a couple of cave snakes that complained about the flash lights as we all took photos.

Apart from that, a couple of games of golf and several swims in the caravan park pool filled in the time satisfactorily.