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We agreed to set off to Roper Bar together. By 9am the temperature was already 32 degrees. The boys caught another grunter but it was not up to size. We got talking to a local fisho who delayed our departure for another hour but I got some more data for my book of tales! We heard that the roads we had just travelled through near Hells Gate were now closed because of the wet conditions. We keep hearing people say that the wet is coming early - but we don't know what to believe.
We travelled 40kms on bitumen to get back to Borroloola and then hit gravel road with rough corrugations which would take us the 370kms to Roper Bar. We travelled at 80 - 90km/hr until the Nathan River homestead where we had to traverse along tracks through the property. The recent rain had caused a black soil slick, which we had been warned about, but it was now dry. We stopped at the banks of the Limmen Bight river for lunch and some fishing. We heard lots of splashing but had no catches. I took Sharon down to investigate a noise we'd heard and found a small freshwater crocodile only 1 foot from the edge of the bank. She was really impressed because it was the first she had ever seen in the wild.
We moved on again and the heat was becoming almost unbearable. We stopped at the Town's River where we had heard that Merewyn and Andy had caught 2 good sized barra a few days earlier. Unfortunately there is only room a few campers and already the best spots were taken by two vehicles who were out on the river in a tinnie and looked set to stay for many weeks to come.
The guys were getting hot and tired but we drove on further and stopped at the St Vidgeons ruins. Behind the ruins, out of sight from the roadside, lays Lomarieum Lagoon. We didn't stay here for the night but continued further on to Roper Bar.
By this stage David was exhausted and I took over the driving. I was a little nervous at first because I had not driven much with the trailer, and definately not at the speeds necessary in the corrugations. We made it safely of couse though into Roper Bar and fueled up at another expensive store. Fuel here cost $1/litre and I didn't buy the lettuce at $4.40 or the 4 tomatoes for $4.80 or the 2 litre orange jice for $7 but I am craving fresh food!
We camped at the Roper Bar camp ground and enjoyed hot showers and prepared a BBQ with Mark and Sharon. We were rather low on supplies so we had sausages, onions, tinned beetroot, tinned potato salad and pinneapple for dinner.
We all slept in this morning and woke tired and sore. We packed up slowly and had to have another shower it was so hot again. We were a little disappointed with Roper Bar, having come so far and seen so little and the boys really wanted to catch a barra. The operator of the camp ground offered to take us fishing in his boat but he charged $150 per person for a full day fishing with a maximum of 3 passengers. Although he showed us his photo album of each catch and guaranteed 12 big ones in one day we thought it was a bit expensive and decided to try our luck fishing from the banks. Of course we were not lucky and moved on to our next destination.
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Roper Bar Crossing |
I was keen to visit Mataranka thermal springs as when I lived in Darwin I never had the opportunity to travel as far south. I think Mark and Sharon were suffering from the heat a little and said that they would come and have a look but wouldn't swim. However, when we arrived at Mataranka Homestead and saw the green lawns of the camp ground right by the thermal springs (which were free) we decided to stay a few days.
| We had arrived fairly early and so spent the entire day lazing about in the beautiful clear waters of the thermal springs. |  |
In the evening we had ourselves a happy hour and watched a magnificant sunset with thousands of fruit bats circling the skies.
Although we were in the perfect location to fish for barramundi it was too hot to get motivated to do anything so serious. As it was, our fridge battery had gone flat again and once the boys had lifted the bonnet to investigate the wiring they became engrosed in locating the reason for the poor performance of our new battery. In the end they connected Mark's generator to our battery and ran it for many hours. It was very small and very quiet so it didn't bother us or anyone at all.
In the meantime, the boys errected our 6m x 5m tarp to give us some shade and David set up our shower to one of the side poles to run water from the tap on demand. Every half hour we would stand up and plug in the hose to the shower head and have a cold shower and then settle back to our idle activities.
That night, right on cue, the bats came over as they did the night before. It was a fantastic sight. We cooked a combo meal together - that is, Sharon and Mark prepared a pumpkin curry and we cooked a Malaysian beef curry with cauliflower and rice and put it all in the middle to share with a bottle of red wine...ahh life is tough.
We lifted camp this morning and headed towards Katherine. Mark and Sharon decided to move on ahead of us and we diverted out to Katherine Gorge in hope of hiring a canoe for the afternoon.
After stocking up in Katherine we arrived at the Gorge about 12 noon and due to such dismyal service and lack of canoes we left at 1pm. Maybe our tempers were running thin in the heat, but we were really put out by the poor service we received despite the operation being fully commercialised.
We drove on to Litchfield National Park and arrived around 5pm. We stopped at Buley's Rockholes for a quick cool down before finding a 4WD only campground at the base of the Florence Falls. We were a little surprised to find others camping here and even more surprised to find 5 vehicles from the Toyota Landcruiser Club whom we knew. It was Tony Price and Rob Alexander and co. so we spent some time with them that evening.
The night was extremely hot and the mossies became intolerable so we decided to go to Darwin tomorrow.
We left the camp ground at 9am and took the back route into Darwin via Tolmer Falls, Wangi Falls and Berry Springs. We arrived in Darwin at midday and after phoning Rosy she met us at her house so we could settle ourselves in. Rosy's boyfriend Jimmy also came home from work to meet us and show us where we would be sleeping.
We then had the afternoon to ourselves when they went back to work and our first priority of course was to find someone to repair our crippled trailer, replace our broken rear window, replace the broken power supply to my computer and have the car serviced.
We are gradually getting through the list but in this heat we're talking our time not to over stress ourselves! Ha!
I can't believe its October already. Rosy has confirmed that the Mindal Beach markets are on tonight so we're looking forward to that. Currently, I'm using Rosy's computer to update our website and David is doing the same to other files on our laptop. Rosy has workmen in the house installing an airconditioner and it's all quite civilised really. After 70 days on the road we really found it rather strange to be sleeping under a roof and four walls with hot water on tap and all the mod cons of a normal existence.
Darwin has been very humid and temperatures are in the high 30s. We've done our usual spending spree in the big smoke before heading off into the bush and hope we are fully prepared for the next leg of our journey. Darwin has changed enormously since I was last here in 1993 with new shopping malls, bars and restaurants. It still lives up to its reputation of being the "party town" and now has an entire street dedicated to the backpacker population. We keep in touch with Mark and Sharon and are planning to begin the next stage of our trip in convoy.
