Adelaide River (for Mar. 9)

We awoke to light rain. We had thin to heavy overcast all day, threatening rain showers, but we only had a couple of light showers.

I began my day with a trip to the toilet where I found a one inch frog (not including legs) on top of the toilet tank and a six inch lizard (nose to tail) on the wall (he scurried behind the tank). I thought that is no big deal and opened the toilet lid to find a three inch frog in there! I decided to use the other stall. There was another small frog in the shower and another three inch one on the sink when I went to shave. Talk about getting close to nature!


In the morning, we took a cruise up Katherine Gorge on the Katherine River. There are 13 sections split by sets of rapids. At the height of “the wet” they use a jet boat to travel over the rapids up to the 4th or 5th gorge. During “the dry” they have 50 passenger cruise boats stationed in each section and you walk around each set of rapids to the next boat. In our case the water was not high enough for the speed boat and it had not been high enough to get the cruise boats beyond the second rapids, so that is as far as we got.



At the cruise dock area, I hiked to the lookout with some of the others while Celeste and some others took in the Visitor Centre. Once again, the heat and humidity ensured a wet and stinky t-shirt. There are thousands of bats here of two varieties, a larger one and a smaller one. They hang like fruit from the trees around the boat landing.






After lunch our time was limited because all the others had booked only 3 days of the 4 day tour. They all had to make connections to go home or to carry on their holiday. With the little time remaining, we voted to take in an authentic outback pub 15 km off the beaten track. It was pretty much in the middle of nowhere and there was no one else around, but apparently they are pretty busy on the weekends with hunters, amateur prospectors, and city people looking for a rustic diversion. They claimed to have a museum, but it was really a collection of old junk buried under dust and cobwebs. There were a couple of interesting items, but the main attraction was the atmosphere.


From there we dropped off the others at the town of Adelaide River where another bus was waiting for them. We went on to Mount Bundy Station, a former cattle station homestead now operating as a campground. Our tour operator had another setup like the previous two, but it looked like they were the only ones using it, at least at this time of year. They had warned us that it was pretty rustic, but it was very similar to the others except that it did not have a reception area, bar, and restaurant, which we didn’t use in the other places anyway.

Nearby was a forest of Cathedral termite mounds.


Normally on these tours, the guide organizes the tour members to share cooking and cleanup duties. With two extra guides, our duties had been pretty light until now. But with three guides and two tourists, they left us completely at leisure for a walk around the area. Just before supper, Ros’s partner showed up to surprise her. He had been away for 2-3 weeks and was on his way back to Darwin. She wasn’t expecting to see him until next day. We had a pleasant evening of visiting and story telling.