Katherine

Coming in to Katherine was such a relief... a real town with real shops and no more roadhouse prices for a while. I don't mind paying fair prices, and I know small towns and long distances equals more expensive but $11 for a loaf of frozen bread and a packet of chips... or $3.60 for a can of coke... it all starts to sour after a while. I didn't mind Katherine as a town. It was a good place to stop for a couple of days, catch up on school, restock on groceries and just enjoy the offerings.

We stayed at a lovely caravan park in walking distance to the hot springs and it also had a swimming pool, so it was well located and set up for the hot weather. Even though the weather had been getting hotter as we came north, it felt like the minute we hit Katherine it was not just hot, but horribly humid as well. The swimming pool was a definite hit as Tilda met some friends there, which was nice after quite a while without other kids to play with. Some of them are heading the same way as us so we are hoping to cross paths occasionally for a play/catch up. The swimming pool was also a great place to talk to other families who have already done the Kakadu-Litchfield-Darwin journey, or even into WA, to ask questions and find out the “must do” things.

We spent the first afternoon in the hot springs. These are nowhere near as warm at Bitter Springs and Mataranka, only around 26-28 degrees, but very refreshing. There are a series of pools but we only stayed in the top pool as we ran into some locals on the way to the pools and they suggested the top pool was the safest and the lower pools may be too close to the Katherine River to guarantee safety. They may have just been pulling our leg but we figured it wasn't worth the risk. Besides, the top pool was pretty good. There is a small pool where you can see the fissure the water flows out of. It is only small (2-3 people can fit in it) and then the water flows over some rocks into the top pool. This creates quite a strong current that flows down the pool and over some rocks. The kids had a great time floating down the current to where the water flowed over a rock wall towards a lower pool and then swimming back up, just outside the strong flow of water, only to do it all again. It was a lot of fun and Rory managed it quite well in his life jacket, with help from me to swim back “upstream”.

We visited the Low Level Reserve, which is very pretty but is on the Katherine River so you do need to be mindful of crocodiles (read: I was freaking out every minute).

We also visited NT Rare Rocks. This shop is pretty cool. It is run by an older gentleman who has collected the rocks himself. There are all sorts of rocks, some of which can only be found in the NT or across the very top of Australia. There were things like amethyst, thunder eggs, snowflake obsidian (I loved this!) and other crystals, as well as the famous zebra stone, okapi stone and beautifully layered sandstones. The prices were reasonable and we bought a weird assortment of interesting rocks. Fortunately the owner wrote down the names of them all so that we wouldn't forget!