Darwin 2012–Katherine to Alice Springs

This update encompasses 2 days of travel, Katherine to Three Ways station and then Three Ways to Alice Springs. We are on our homeward stretches now.

Before we get into the trip, here are some animals i photographed at Rachel's before we headed off.

We left Katherine a bit later than we normally would as we saw the kids off to their school busses first, then off we went. The trip was mostly uneventful with the only really interesting part where we needed to stop due to a truck accident. From the chatter over the radio it seems the driver was OK, a few cuts and bruises. The truck, a tanker road train, “chucked a wobbly” and from that it seems the last trailer out of how many we are not sure, but normally four, started to wobble all over the road. i suspect it then unhitched and went over the embankment. We got there at the end of the recovery operation.

After that excitement we pulled into Three Ways happy to get out of the caravan. Unfortunately the park did not live up to expectations. We stopped here as we wanted to avoid Tennant Creek, somewhere we had heard nothing good about, but the park turned out to be the worst of the whole trip. The water out of all the taps, including the showers, was brown, smelled and we paid more for a night here than in Alice Springs. We would not recommend staying here to anyone.

I did, however, get an opportunity in the evening for some Astrophotography. I am in the process of stacking and post processing the images but below is some single frames that have turned out OK. With the moon now almost gone the sky looks great.

 

We awoke early the next day to find the starts still out, however after a brown water shower, the sun was rising and we were on the road again.

We had a few stops however the highlight, as always, was the Devils Marbles. We stopped here again for photos and during one of my climbing missions i grazed my leg, taking a sizable bit of meat away. Not Happy.

The camp ground at the rear of the marbles looked good and had a number of campers just puling out for the day. We also stopped at the Ti Tree roadhouse for lunch, where we caught up with the trailer from yesterdays accident.

For our stay in Alice Springs the time we have stopped at the G’Day Mate caravan park, on recommendation. So far it is a nice clean park with great amenities. For the first time we even had the park owners park the van on our site for us

Darwin 2012 - Katherine

We have been in Katherine for a week so far. Its not much of a town but we have family here.One of my sisters, Rachel, lives on the RAAF base at Tindal, and the other, Rebecca, lives in Katherine itself.

Katherine is a fairly major town for NT with all of the service you would expect of a regional town. It is also the gateway to the Kimberley. Otherwise there is not much to do here excepting the normal tourist type stuff so we are having a great catch up with the family (including the 7 niece/nephews )

I have been back out to the Katherine River low levels for a bit of a look as i am trying to convince the brother in-laws that we need to go fishing for Barramundi, but the river is still flowing heavily due to the “Wet” just finishing. We did go down to set some traps to catch Cherabin, a local freshwater prawn. We set these at around 6pm one night and went back down at 11:30 pm to retrieve them. A good survey of the water was required first in case there were any large reptiles in the area but we did not see any. We managed to catch 7 large Cherubin thinking we would have a god snack the next day. Unfortunately they were left in the bucket overnight and therefore died. We will need to catch some more if we are to taste them.

See the logs stuck in the branches of the tree from the last flood above.

 

My first Barramundi dish for the trip.

I also took the parents out to the Katherine Gorge. Mum was not interested in a river boat tour so it was a quick look only. I have been out in he past and will look up some of those photos to add when i get home.

Everything's closed due to high waters and Crocodiles

Below is the fuel usage so far for the trip. You can see the usage fluctuating between 15.5 and 17.5 L/100Km which would be due to drivers and headwind. Otherwise, for the load we have been towing i expect this usage is OK for Petrol.

We are off to Darwin on Friday before returning to Katherine for a few more days then home

Darwin 2012–Banka Banka to Katherine

What a great nights sleep we had. Banka Banka is a non-powered campsite so we had no air conditioning or fans. To solve the issue of the heat, it was still around 38deg, we fully opened the van up, including all the vents. This, coupled with a full moon, meant i was basically sleeping under the stars and had a great view outside my window.

We got up early and took off by 6:30, electing to have breakfast on the road somewhere. This was planned to be cereal but in the end we had a cooked breakfast at the Dunmara Petrol station. Wow, a full cooked breakfast in the middle of nowhere for only $12. the biggest problem this caused was that once we arrived at Daly waters a few hours later we were still too full and could not partake of the Barramundi dishes for lunch.

Daly Waters was very interesting and we stopped here for a drink, before heading off to Rachels. We didn't stop too much but it wasn't a long day either.

Unfortunately the surprise arrival was not to be as Rachel was using the apple “Find my friends” app to track mums phone. We came around the corner to her house to find them all out the front waiting

We will be in Katherine for the next week before heading up to Darwin for the weekend.

Lastly, some Iphone/Instagram photos…

Potential Darwin Trip

Another quick update, In the new year, April to be exact, i may have the opportunity to revisit Katherine. My parents are planning a road trip from Melbourne to Katherine and at this stage i am planning on traveling with them. Unfortunately due to timing and the impact some of these trips are having on the kids schooling, Sara and the girls wont be traveling with us.

What this means is that we will be traveling lighter than normal in that we will only have one car, a Holden Colorado and more than likely our Jayco Expanda. This will prove to be a very different experience to 2009 when we did this in the camper trailer. Mum and Dad did the last trip in their Toyota Kluger, sleeping in the back, so it should also be a more comfortable trip for them :)

Many of the planned stops will be familiar however we will be planning on doing some of the things we missed the first time around. We are also going to attempt some free stay stops to help reduce costs and experience something different.



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More to come on this however as always, if you have any suggestions, especially for free stay camp spots, please leave a comment.