Katherine to Kununurra

Although we spent a week at Katherine on the way North, we decided to stop there for a couple of days again, before we swung West. We wanted to do the walk along the Katherine River, which was slightly longer than we had anticipated and slightly less interesting, but nevertheless was still worth spending a couple of hours on. We also wanted to play a last game of golf on grass greens.

The drive from Katherine to Kununurra is reasonably interesting, passing through the Gregory National Park which has towering sandstone cliffs. It also, unfortunately, has a lot of roadwork, so the 514 km took us a bit longer than planned. It didn't matter though, because we had forgotten about the 1.5 hours time difference between WA and NT, so we got to Kununurra in plenty of time to go to the information centre and supermarket, and have a look around the town.

The WA border is only about 40km East of Kununurra, so it is probably closer in reality to central time, our first night here last night we were most taken aback when it got dark by 5:30, and this morning was light much earlier than we have gotten used to.

Entering the state of WA felt like trying to get into a foreign country. In fact, there was more palaver at the state border than in almost any of the country borders now in Europe - you can drive from one country to another without anything other than a faded roadsign to tell that you should now be speaking a different language. To enter WA, however, we had to queue up behind all the other vans (is there anyone left back in Melbourne - it seems like half of Victoria is on the road up here) to go through first of all a police checkpoint (can I have a look at your licence please sir, is this your own vehicle, I'll just record the licence plate number) and then through customs, who were looking to confiscate any fresh fruit or veg, seeds, soil and so on. We had been told about this, so had been running down our fruit and veg supply, and gave away the last few salad items when we stopped for lunch on the way. However, the customs inspector opened half a dozen cupboards in the van and discovered half a jar of supermarket honey, which was duly confiscated. You can buy exactly the same brand of honey in the supermarket here, and it probably comes from China anyway, so apart from stimulating the Kununurra economy by all us travellers having to stock up again we don't really see what they are achieving. We still had the rubbish bag with things like the end of the tomato from our lunch sandwiches, I tried to give the bag to him to dispose of but he said just to chuck it out when we got to Kununurra. Let's hope it wasn't a diseased tomato!