Through the Northern Territory

In the last 6 days we've travelled almost 1,300km across the Northern Territory. Once we left Mt Isa we had a long day's towing westwards on the Barkly Hwy to Three Ways, a road house at the junction of the Barkly Highway and the Stuart Highway, which runs up the centre of Australia from Port Augusta to Darwin. In the 600 odd kilometres across the flat Barkly Tablelands there are so few settlements that the distance markers indicate the distance to the Stuart Highway - there are no towns at all. We spent a couple of nights at Three Ways (which is pretty unusual for them, almost everyone just treats it as an overnight stop over) and on our 'rest day' headed 100 km southwards to the Devil's Marbles. We had stopped here briefly on our way up the centre 2 years ago, but on that day we had been in a bit of a rush so hadn't been able to spend as long as we wanted here. It's a marvellous place, a huge area strewn with round boulders, seemingly piled on top of one another in deliberate design. We did not only the signposted walk, which has information boards on the geology of the rocks and the animals and plants that call the area home, but also wandered around the informal paths that wind through and over the formations.

From Three Ways we headed north up the Stuart Hwy, stopping for the night at Daly Waters, which is pretty famous in travelling circles. Although there used to be a township here, and even Australia's first international airport, used by Qantas in the days when planes could fly only a short distance between refuelling stops, there is now only a pub and a caravan park. The pub does excellent meals and puts on entertainment during the dry season, if the night we were there is anything to go by they must make a mint out of it, as the caravan park was virtually full and everyone came to the pub for the 'beef and barra' meal. Not surprising really, there isn't any other reason you'd bother to visit the place, and the caravan park is dry and dusty with horrid dirty amenities. The steak and fish were surprisingly good, and we quite enjoyed the 'outback show', but having now ticked off this destination we can't imagine we'd ever come back.

Next stop was Katherine, another place we visited before when we were in this part of Australia on our first time around. In fact, as Katherine is on not only the north-south route but also the road west, we have visited here twice before, so we were quite surprised to find that there were things we still hadn't done here. We spent an entire afternoon doing the 'cultural experience' tour, which turned out to be very interesting. The first part is run by Manuel, an aboriginal man in his late forties, who was born and grew up in the bush east of Katherine. Even in the 1960s his family lived a traditional lifestyle, hunting for their food and making all their tools and implements from the bush, he didn't even learn English until he was an adult. He gave a fascinating talk about his childhood and his life. We then split into 2 groups to do traditional painting. Wendy chose to do a 'dot' painting, in the style of the Central Australian aborigines, while John stayed with Manuel to do a line painting. Apart from us there were only 2 other people on the tour who also split up, so there were 2 people doing each style. John's line painting is a yam, which seemed to be the easiest of the pictures he was offered to copy, and while painting the outline was fairly simple the intricate coloured cross-hatching took him nearly an hour. Wendy's dot painting bookmark tells a story - a woman goes hunting goanna, then it rains and forms a waterhole. The hardest part was doing the feet, she practised until she was happy that she could do the foot print properly, but then painted a really good print on the wrong side, she'd forgotten that you have 2 kinds of foot prints. Her instructor painted over it and this time Wendy did her left and right feet on the correct sides.

While our paintings were drying Manuel gave us demonstrations of some traditional bush skills. He used 2 sticks to light a fire, something we've always heard about but never seen in real life. It only took a couple of minutes of twirling the fire stick between his palms for the first wisps of smoke to appear, once he'd produced an ember he tipped it into the waiting grass 'nest' and we had a nice fire going. He then demonstrated using a woomera, or throwing stick, to throw a spear, then we all had a go. We each managed to hit the cardboard kangaroo with one of our 2 attempts, even if it was only in the foot and the tail. At least if he'd been standing still we'd have managed to wing him!

We had a terrific afternoon, and we have unique and beautiful hand crafted souvenirs to show for it!

Katherine's most famous attraction is Nitmiluk, or Katherine Gorge, about 30 km away. When we were here before we did a long walk and the cruise at the gorge, but had run out of time without looking through the display at the visitor centre, so we drove out and spent an hour or so there. We also climbed up to the lookout to have another look at the spectacular view. We had hoped to be able to go canoeing on the river, but the late wet season experienced right across the top end meant that they still haven't been certain of clearing the gorge of salt water crocodiles, so the river is still closed except for the cruises.

The Ghan is the train that runs north-south right across the continent between Adelaide and Darwin. We heard it was in town and went over to Katherine station to have a look. The train is over a kilometre long and we got there just as it started to pull out. At first the movement was almost imperceptible, it must take an awful lot of effort to get something that long and heavy going, but gradually the engine got into its rhythm and the train headed off northwards on the final leg of its journey.

All in all, despite having been in Katherine a couple of times before, we've managed to fill in a few days here very satisfactorily.