To Katherine and Mataranka

We left our accommodation at Pandanus on Litchfield yesterday morning, stopping for a coffee at the Litchfield Outback Resort on the way out of Batchelor. We were hoping they made their coffees as well as they bar-b-qued their steaks (as Rob had experienced the night before - a real Territory sized helping - along with a pint of Guinness - as you do in the Outback!). 

But we found they made their steaks far better than they made their coffees unfortunately!

Katherine is a bit less than 3 hours drive (250klm) south of Batchelor - on a good road with a 130klm speed limit - but single lane, so the big road trains and the big old RVs can slow you down at times.  Anyway we got to Katherine a bit before midday with a few hours to kill before we could check into our accommodation. We got good advice from the Information Centre and headed straight to the Katherine "Hot Springs" on the banks of the Katherine River and only a 5 minute drive from the centre of town for our first outing here.

Rob took a pic of our hire car (a pretty new MG) parked up against a fence of brilliant flowering bougainvillea  at the "Hot Springs" car park.

I avoided taking a picture with people in it but this was a popular spot at lunchtime - there were dozens of people around enjoying the "hot springs" today (water around 34oC - and croc free!).

We are enjoying some lighter lunches now we're on our own compared to all the gourmet tucker we enjoyed and overfed ourselves with on the Outback Spirit tour.

Afterwards we visited this beautiful, contemporary gallery a little south of town, on the Stuart Highway.

There was an exhibition of work from the Warringarri Art Centre - a collaboration with our own National Gallery of Australia, but I was most taken with this small exhibition of traditional shell dolls representing clan groups of the Groote Archipelago - handcrafted by Anindilyakwa women. The gallery, and the quality of the work in it, out here in Katherine, came as a real surprise to me.

We are very happy with our accommodation - new, architect designed (flood and cyclone proof) cabins at Discovery Park on Gorge Road - a few klms out of town and in a lovely setting with trees around and lots of birdlife.

It was lovely sitting on our little bush verandah last night, with a beer, watching the sun set .......

... and the full moon rise .........

Today, we set out for Mataranka, about an hour and a quarter drive south of Katherine on the Stuart Highway. Mataranka is only a small town - made famous by the novel "We of the Never Never" by Jeannie Gunn. The book - a memoir - is about Jeannie's time at nearby Elsey Station in the early days of the 20th century. I remember reading the book as a young person and talking about it with my dear old Aunty Ivy who loved the book I remember - no doubt because so much of it mirrored her mother's and grandmother's experiences (in outback Queensland) too.

Mataranka has the quirkiest little museum (mostly all outdoors) attached to its tiny public library documenting its early pastoral and wartime history. It cost $3 admission (cash only) - and was the best value $3 of the whole trip I would say!

We drove the short distance then out to the Mataranka Thermal Pool on the Roper River, stopping to take a look at the Elsey Homestead on the way. The building is a replica, built in the 1980s for the film adaptation of the "We of the Never Never" novel. The timbers on this replica homestead are still looking pretty strong although you can see a lot of damage from the recent devastating wet season floods when you look closely.

The Mataranka fan palms, unique to this part of Australia, form a lush cooling forest around the thermal springs of Elsey National Park.

It was like Bondi Beach at the thermal pool today - RV rigs crowding the car park - crowds of people and families all with their pool noodles enjoying the 34oC free flowing water. 

This popular pool is fed continuously by this Rainbow Spring. The water is so crystal clear it looks this distinctive azure blue to the eye - amazing!! It's also not strictly a "thermal pool". The water rises up from a deep underground aquifer and it's heated by the earth's natural temperature (around 340C all year.)

We did a lovely, easy 3klm loop walk past the main thermal pool along the Waterhouse River to "Stevie's Hole".

We enjoyed a picnic lunch at nearby Bitter Springs - a much more open area for swimming, fringed by paperbark and fan palm forests.

Once again Bitter Springs was as crowded as Bondi Beach today (despite my carefully composed photos). There are absolutely no facilities at these hot spring swimming areas so the car parks are chock a block with people in their big RV rig set ups (most with boats) so they can get changed, make lunch, get a drink etc etc and make a day of it by these oasis like swimming holes. 

At least there was one (very smelly) drop toilet at Bitter Springs. The toilet at the Mataranka Springs was a bit more high tech but it was a good distance away from where people were swimming.

We made it back to Katherine by a bit after 4pm this afternoon. Its a no frills kinda town and not one we find inviting to stay awhile. Over half of the population here is Aboriginal but its a town definitely run by the whites. There are security grills up everywhere and a strong police presence. I had to show my ID to a cop when I went shopping for a carton of zero alcohol beer at the BWS in town yesterday. So different to where we've been in Arnhem Land where the Aboriginal population is in the majority, has Native Title of the land, and sets the rules!

Aside from all that ......being in Woolies, surrounded by long legged Aboriginal girls - as black as - all speaking in language loud as you like - is a pretty special and amazing Katherine experience too!

Post trip - exploring Litchfield

This was our last view of beautiful Coral Bay from the deck of the Seven Spirit Bay Lodge last Monday morning. We had an 8.30 start from the lodge - on our way back to Darwin.

It was back to the Vashon Head airstrip for us - we were in the first group to leave Cobourg Peninsula today. Our little Cessna 12 seater had to have its freight load unpacked before we could get loaded. Mia was our pilot and chief cargo handler - just one more of the many young women (mostly under 30 I'd say) who have been the backbone of the Outback Spirit operation here in the NT. They have been amazing, driving trucks, boats, planes, guiding, cooking, everything!

While some of the guests relaxed in air conditioned comfort in the terminal.

We crossed over the waters of Van Diemen's Gulf on the 45 minute flight back to Darwin - and across the southern coast of Melville Island.

Our tour group was booked into the Hilton Garden Inn on Darwin Esplanade and a sunset harbour cruise was on offer on our last night as a finale to this fabulous tour of Arnhem Land.

Darwin turned on another sensational sunset for us to enjoy as we dined on beautiful seafood and enjoyed the customary Outback Spirit open bar hospitality.

Having David and Ro with us on this trip has made it really special for us. We're gonna miss them - as they're heading straight back to Cairns after this.

We all have enjoyed this trip so much - seeing such a unique and remote part of Australia, being so well looked after by Outback Spirit and our EXCELLENT tour leader/driver Dave. We were also lucky to be in the company of very good fellow travellers, most of them rather elderly like us but pretty fit and spritely with it - mostly.

So we set out on our own yesterday...... picking up our Sixt hire car from Darwin Airport and then heading south to Litchfield National Park. It felt quite hard travelling without someone organising our morning tea, lunch and dinner, afternoon drinks, organising our guides and outings and sorting our washing too!!

We'd been to Litchfield on a previous visit to the NT many years ago but couldn't remember much about the details. Our first stop was Wangi Falls on the far western loop road of the National Park. It's a stunning stop but popular with visitors these days (there certainly weren't as many people around on our previous visit).

This very cute lace monitor wasn't fazed by all the people about.

We decided to do the steep climb to the top of the falls despite the whole of the loop walk not being accessible today because of repair work. The climb was pretty tough for us - very rough, uneven footing and quite steep too. We were very careful especially coming back down.....

The view from the top was pretty amazing though.

Coming back down, this view out to the carpark in the distance shows how high up we were.

This section of monsoon forest was a welcome respite after climbing so high in 30oC heat.

We drove back then towards the eastern entry to the park - deciding we only had one more walk in us today. This was to Florence Falls......... where it was an easy walk to get to the lookout.

........ but 135 steps down to the waterfall plunge pool - luckily they were beautifully constructed this time, very safe to navigate, very even.

It was lovely to sit and relax here for a while beside the pools of gurgling water as the impact of the hot day and the after effects of a pretty hectic (but highly indulgent) two weeks hit us.

We drove back to our basic cabin accommodation at Pandanus on Litchfield around 4pm. Luckily the a/c worked well and after a rest and cool down we were ready to go looking for our dinner at nearby Batchelor. We're heading for Katherine tomorrow.

Last day in the Cobourg Peninsula

Last night's dinner on the deck at sunset was a memorable end to our first full day at the Seven Spirit Bay Wilderness Lodge. Meals throughout the trip have been restaurant quality - but it's the settings that are truly mind blowing (and the free flowing open bar tab each night - wow wow wow!) and this one is probably the best of the best.

We had an easy day today, our last full day at Seven Spirit Bay. We enjoyed a 4WD "safari' in the morning with our favourite guide Maddie looking at some of the natural wonders of the Garig Gunak Barlu National Park surrounding our resort. 

Maddie could make any excursion memorable but she was at her best this morning - making termite activity in the national park enthralling (among other things) - this is an arboreal termite mound apparently .............

... and then she spotted this Banteng cow feeding near the road. They are feral nuisance animals now after their ancestors were released at the abandonment of the Victoria Settlement in the 1840s (along with pigs and Timor ponies and all sorts of other animals and plants that are ecological problems now).

Bentang cows are very timid so we were lucky to see this obscured view of one in the nearby undergrowth.

She found us this bower bird nest too ....... and later we had a sighting of an actual bower bird.........

More Turkey Bush - and another Turkey Bush story. Maddie's was better than the previous one we'd heard - and this bush was flowering at camera height!!

This is our favourite guide, Maddie, enthralling us all with her descriptions of the fresh water mangrove forests and how amazing the paperbarks are for providing vital medicines, handy tools and also supplies of fresh water in desperate times. She really can make any subject absolutely enthralling and quite funny too!.

A beautiful, lush spot in this otherwise dry, "fire farmed" Savannah forest.......

At the end of our walk this morning we came upon the Nypa Palm "gallery", one of only four locations in Australia where these quite fickle plants can be found growing..........

It was quite lovely to stay a while here, enjoy the lushness and observe the prolific birdlife in the area.

We'd obviously worked hard enough this morning to deserve a very special lunch event at a beach a bit south of our lodge - at Low Point (but definitely NOT a low point in our day!).

Staff had erected a marquee for us on the beach, set up a long table with all the trimmings including linen this and linen that - and cooked us a superb bar-b-que lunch with all the extras. Of course there was the usual full open bar as well (transported there in big eskies).

Not a bad beach setting as a backdrop! ..................

After lunch we were taken out in one of the lodge's state of the art fishing vessels (with our own driver guide) for an afternoon's fishing adventure around the sheltered bays of Port Essington. It was just David and Ro and me and Rob with Norm, our Aboriginal fishing guide in our boat........

Unfortunately the winds were too strong to go too far into the exposed waters of the port. We all got drenched and a bit too rocked about trying to venture too far out of the more sheltered bays. In the end Norm decided to keep us safe and closer into shore for our fishing adventures today.

I caught the first fish - woohoo - a Queen fish (of course). She was ginormous but not suitable to keep (the lodge's chef makes the decision about which fish will be kept and which will be released on any given day (a no waste policy!). My Queenie was released, I'm pleased to say, after giving me all the fun of catching her!

Rob made a great catch too........

... a very jumpy barracuda - also released!

Norm was a taciturn guide but an absolute gun fisherman - I loved his lure knotting techniques. We kept him busy with our inexperience and the rate at which our fish were biting. Bless him!

David was next - hooking this barracuda after losing 2 fish at the last minute as they were being brought into the boat.

After persisting with a few lure fails Ro finally landed this mackerel - her personal fish totem.... such a wonderful way to end off our day at Seven Spirit Bay.

We had another round of sunset drinks and canapes on the sunset deck of the lodge tonight and one last chance to enjoy a superb evening meal with a lovely bunch of people we've shared this amazing adventure with. It's back to Darwin tomorrow!!