Well, what an exciting day it has been today. So much fodder for the blog.
So strap yourselves in.
But first I need to tell you about last night at the Daly Waters Pub.
We were told that Tim – the owner of the pub, I guess – gives a talk “around about 5.30”. Tim time, a bit like African time … it happens when it happens.
Now, yesterday I made an oblique comment about Tim being the correct weight for someone who should be twice as tall. Maybe I wasn’t clear.
A wise person once said that “… all things being equal, fat people use more soap.”
Tim uses a lot of soap. I mean, a LOT of soap, because he has a very large surface area. He seems like a really nice guy, but how his heart pumps blood around that body is a miracle of modern medicine. Maybe he has two hearts?
In fact, I’m going to call him Tim-Tim from now on, because he is big enough to be two people.
So we purchased a couple of Lemon, Lime and Bitters, and settled in. Somewhere after 5.30 (I think it was closer to 5.45), Tim-Tim trundles out on his mobility scooter and sets himself up near the entertainment area stage.
Tim-Tim proceeded to tell us all about the history of the pub, why there are so many bras nailed up on the wall, the Packers (as in Kerry Packer) who owned the property next door (which I think he said was 10,000 square km, but I could have that wrong), and the Japs (his word) and the history of WW2 and the Daly Waters area.
He also shared his views on poor old Paddy who disappeared from Larrimah. You will need to watch ”Last Stop Larrimah” if you don’t know about Paddy, but be sure to check your sensitivities at the door and be prepared to learn some new words 🙂
He also lectured us about people in caravans who go too fast on NT roads (they have a 130km/h speed limit here, remember?) and end up crashing.
Although, to be fair to old Tim-Tim, it seems like when there is a bad accident around Daly Waters, his beer garden gets converted to a triage centre, because he said that he has had people laid out on his tables for “up to 8 hours” waiting for the RFDS to arrive.
That’s Royal Flying Doctor Service for the acronymally challenged.
After Tim-Tim finished his talk, Steve Case – the local travelling muso – started to play a couple of sets and that was our signal to head off back to Percy and get dinner underway. We thought we would leave the live music and the dancing to the young(er) people.
It was a bit of a cool night again. Sometime around 5.30am, MBW obviously got cold and pulled up the quilt.
I was asleep and I hadn’t noticed. Sorry 🙁
But I did notice that it was cold getting out of the shower this morning, and I put on a flannelette shirt to keep warm. That’s in addition to my usual attire.
I probably shouldn’t need to clarify that, but I felt I should.
I slept really well again last night. The sleep of the pure and innocent.
So ablutions, breakfast, and pack down Percy.
Connect all of the things that need connecting, and disconnect all of the things that need disconnecting. Roll up the hoses and cords, store them away, put on the weight distribution hitch, retract the step, lock the doors, batten down the hatches, set the turbos to “warp speed”, and we are off.
We had a bit of a dilemma this morning. Elsie was showing just under half a tank of fuel with approximately 260km range on the trip computer. Daly Waters to Katherine is about 282km, and I don’t trust Elsie’s trip computer anyway.
Elsie has an optimism bias, and I think that her 260km range is based on a best case scenario, and doesn’t take into consideration the fact that we are lugging Percy behind us. So it is probably more like 200km because we are only getting about 20 litres/100km.
Which is nothing to be proud of, but if you wanted fuel economy, you’d buy a pushbike. And then Percy would be going nowhere fast.
Or going anywhere at all.
Fuel at Katherine is about 40c/litre cheaper than Daly Waters, so I just needed to put enough tigers into Elsie’s tank to get us to Katherine, and then we could give Elsie a big drink.
So 30 litres of fuel from the Daly Waters servo, and we were off.
Remember yesterday I had a bit of a vent about people that don’t use UHF channel 40? We were travelling along the highway this morning – not far out of Daly Waters – heading north, and we could hear these calls over the radio to caravans and other vehicles that were (obviously, as it turned out) ahead of us.
Because all of a sudden around a curve in the road came a pilot vehicle with all its lights flashing, and we got a call on UHF40 … “hey caravan, find a safe place to stop and get off the road. 5.5 metre wide load following.”
If you do the maths, the road is probably 6-7 metres wide at best, and a 5.5m wide load coming towards us doesn’t leave a great deal of room.
Plenty of room for him. Just no room for the both of us.
My point is that if you are “special” and you monitor a different channel on the CB (ie not UHF40), you wouldn’t have got the message from the pilot vehicle and you’d be having a “code brown” when confronted by a very wide load and no space on the road for both of you.
After that bit of excitement, we got back on the road and about an hour later, found ourselves at …
Larrimah!
And we just had to stop and have a look. Along with about a dozen other vans. Larrimah is a bit of a tourist spot now, and not for Fran’s famous meat pies, either.
That was pretty exciting. We have been to Larrimah!
But onwards and upwards, we kept travelling north.
You see a great deal of road trains on the national highways, outside of big cities. I don’t think that they are allowed any closer to Brisbane than about Chinchilla, but in these more remote areas they are everywhere.
Many of them have three trailers, and some – fuel tankers specifically – have 4 trailers. They are very long and they take up a lot of space on the road.
And every-so-often you need to overtake one that is slow moving … and it is like overtaking a cruise ship.
Through Mataranka and finally into Katherine around lunchtime.
We have decided to stay at the Katherine Farmstay for a couple of nights, with power and water hookup. It means that we can get some washing done and give Percy his weekly clean out. We are fully capable of surviving off the grid (no power and water hookup) for several days, but we need to make sure that we have plenty of water on board, and that is just dead weight that we need to drag behind us.
And power and water hookup here at the Katherine Farmstay is not that much more expensive than no power and water … so it makes sense.
And here is a fun fact: for about the last week we have just been driving and stopping the night, and driving again. I don’t think we have unhooked Percy from Elsie for several days now.
But here at Katherine, we will be doing some day trips and Elsie will get the chance to let the horses run free!
Plus, we will be having a day of free camping in a couple of nights time (at another location), before we leave here.
This is a very pretty spot, and – despite not booking ahead – we jagged a really nice spot under some big shady trees.
Lunch consumed, and we needed to go out and get some groceries.
And fuel. Elise was thirsty.
We found a shopping centre (TBH it’s probably the only shopping centre in Katherine, but we haven’t confirmed that yet). MBW found herself a nice pair of slacks, and then we went and stocked up on groceries at Woolies.
All very civilised. I’ve missed Woolies 🙁
Back to the farmstay, unload the groceries, and we got into our swimmers and headed back to the Katherine Hot Springs for a dip and a soak.
The water was crystal clear and around body temperature, and just delightful to soak in.
Thanks to the magic that is “the fresh food people”, we had a nice dinner of lamb chops on the BBQ tonight, with jacket potato and veggies. I can’t remember the last time we had vegetables, and I was starting to worry about getting scurvy.
Or is scurvy a symptom of not having citrus? I’ll need to Google that …
It was a great day today. I’m feeling tired from all of the driving, but now we have a few days of rest around Katherine before heading off to the National Parks and Darwin for about 9 days.
I was chatting to one of our boys tonight who said that driving long distances like this would be his worst nightmare.
But we are seeing new, fun and interesting things all the time, and meeting new people along the way. Australia really is a big, beautiful place. But there are some very big drives between townships in the NT, and no mobile coverage for much of the time.
First world problems.
Tomorrow we are going to do a 4-hour cruise on the Katherine Gorge which should be spectacular. And we get to go swimming in the gorge too.
But you will hear about that and see photos tomorrow … assuming that we don’t get eaten by a crocodile. That probably wouldn’t be an ideal outcome.
There is a theory that Paddy and his dog (remember Paddy from Larrimah?) were fed to a crocodile, and they never found any traces of him.
Hmmm … maybe I won’t go swimming.
If we stop having fun, we will let you know.
Ciao
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