Barrow Creek Telegraph Station

Barrow Creek was a repeater station opened in 1872 as part of the massive overland telegraph line that ran across the country from Port Augusta to Darwin, and ultimately connected Australia with London. It was a massive undertaking, crossing some 2000 miles of unsettled (and virtually unexplored) back country.




The buildings were open, so we wandered around a bit, trying to imagine what it would be like to live here, dealing with the extremes of the weather and the utter remoteness of the place.



We had lunch at the Wauchope Hotel.



This was one of those places where people leave a bill tacked to the wall (visible in the background above the doorway), so when they come back, they always have money to buy a beer. I had a "salad roll" which was essentially a hamburger without the burger. Poor Darrin is suffering from some serious hat-head.

Devils Marbles

Not too far out of Tennant Creek is an area called Devil's Marbles. The local people believe these boulders to be the eggs of the Rainbow Serpent.




If you can't tell from my posture, it was unbelievably cold, despite the sun; we found out later that it had been in the low 20's at dawn that morning. Hadn't we, just the day before, been lounging in a hot spring in lovely 80 degree weather?




I expect everyone who visits here takes a picture like this.




Devils Marbles is a large deposit of granite that had made its way to the surface via erosion. The area experiences extremes in temperatures (we can attest to that!) which have cracked the rock and caused spalling, creating the rounded shapes. It appears that someone scattered or placed these boulders here, but really they eroded in place.




Its interesting how often the erosion process has left these rocks balancing on small points.




This one is particularly remarkable; its very nearly perfect. The granite has a high iron content, which accounts for the reddish color of the exposed surfaces. The fresher inside surface of the crack is a light grey.

Tennant Creek

The Australian Bustard is one of those birds I felt I should have seen by now, and it was almost a relief to find this pair along the highway. They are handsome creatures, with a 6-7 foot wingspan.




We played leapfrog with this giant boat several times during the drive, passing it (which was difficult, despite the lack of traffic) then being passed when we stopped for gas or lunch. There is something surreal about a giant boat traveling through the desert, especially when you know you are hundreds of miles, in any direction, away from water.




This shot was stolen from the car as we sped by, but kind of captures the feel of the area. The Aborigines we encountered seemed lost and aimless; trapped between the old way of life, which I imagine is mostly gone, and modern Australia, which they seem to have no place in. We saw only a handful of Aborigines who were employed; the rest were... just hanging out; walking along the highways, sitting on the medians, gathered on corners.




We stopped in Tennant Creek and spent the night at the Bluestone Motor Inn on the southern edge of town. When we arrived there was a giant mob disgorging from a tour bus directly into the motel restaurant, so we headed back downtown to Margo Miles for some pizza instead. Tennant Creek was a little... rough. Lots of inebriated Aborigines wandering about, some of whom were loudly arguing and/or beating each other up. While we were eating one of the other customers had to run out of the restaurant to check on his truck because someone was messing with it. Its probably one of the few places in all of Australia where I felt somewhat uncomfortable.




The building that the restaurant was in was old in a pleasant way; reminding me of a small-town cafe in Texas.




We had the Margo Special pizza. Check out the inch-thick layer of ham!

Fran's Devonshire Tea House

This day was the first half of the long, 1100 km drive from Katherine to Alice Springs. We wanted to take advantage of the last bit of warm, tropical weather before heading into the desert winter, so we stopped at Bitter Springs in Mataranka for a swim. This is a completely natural hot spring, with clear waters around 90 degrees. It was so pleasant we spent over an hour here, getting pruny and sunburned while chatting with another vacationing couple.




Mataranka had a little park along the highway with a giant termite mound engraved with a snorting bull (city symbol, I guess) and a number of life size statues of Outback characters. This is Jeannie and Aeneas Gunn, who ran the Elsey Station in the late 1800's. Jeannie wrote a book about her experiences called "We of the Never Never", which popularized that term for the remote outback.




A view of town.




Faithful Lonely Planet described only two real possibilities for lunch stops and Fran's Devonshire Tea House in Larrimah sounded too good to pass up. That's it, behind the hodgepodge of signs. We didn't really know what to expect, and after wandering up to the door and being greeted by Fran, the conversation went something like this:

Fran asks, "Are you hungry?"

Darrin & Michelle, looking around for a menu, say, "Yes!"

Fran asks, "Would you like some lunch?"

D&M, not finding a menu and wondering if we should have paid more attention to the signs out front, say, "Um, yes please!"

Fran offers, "How about some Camel Pie, fresh out of the oven?"

D&M, who until this very moment didn't realize Camel was edible, and for whom the word "pie" usually indicates a dessert, look at each other for a beat and say, "That sounds great!"



And so we each had our own, beautiful, homemade camel pie, which turned out to be similar to other British-type savory meat pies. It was quite tasty; not gamey or weird, and we got to add Camel to the growing list of "Critters We Have Seen in the Wild and Subsequently Eaten While on Vacation".

That is Fran behind me, bringing us our Lemon Squash. She was friendly and charming, and lay on the porch swing chatting with us while we ate. For dessert we had apricot pie with creme caramel topping, again delicious and obviously freshly made. I think this was my favorite meal of the trip.

Everything is Burnabull

From what I understand, during the early part of the dry season the land management folks do a patchwork of controlled burning throughout the Top End, to clear out the dead grass and prevent larger, more devastating fires later on, when things get really dry. The Aborigines had been managing the land in this way for so many years that the flora and fauna have adapted to these little fires; some of them actually dependent now on the fires to propagate. We managed to time our visit so we were smack in the middle of all the burning, and ran across many fires every day. The entire first two weeks of the trip smelled of smoke.

There were several other fire warning signs with catchy phrases like the one above; "We like our lizards frilled, not grilled" was one (occasionally edited to say "fried, not grilled"), and "Don't burn your bird" was another.




I thought I had better photos, you know, something actually showing flames, but after going through all of them it seems I must have shot the good stuff on video, so these will have to do. There were times when fires were raging right along side the road, with impressive flames.




This fire was close enough to where we were hiking that we could hear it roaring and crackling.




The dark spots in the sky you see here are mostly bugs splatted on the windshield, but some of them are Black Kites, which would soar over the fires in large numbers to catch all the critters fleeing the flames... we sometimes saw flocks of 100 or more. This was phenomenal to me, since we are not used to seeing raptors in such concentrations where we live. Our guide on the Yellow Waters Cruise in Kakadu told us that Black Kites will purposefully start new fires by dropping burning sticks. This strikes me as perhaps apocryphal, but I am charmed by the idea.

Nitmiluk River Cruise

We had been looking forward to canoeing up the Katherine river ever since reading about it in the Lonely planet guide, but it was not meant to be. Despite postponing our visit to the park by several days on the advice of the concessioners, they still weren't ready to begin renting the canoes and we were forced to take one of the large guided boat cruises. We took the half-day trip which departed after lunch and the views of the gorge were spectacular.




The river system is actually a series of gorges, separated by rock falls and sandbars, and at each obstacle we all had to unload from the boat, take a short walk, and load back up on another boat waiting on the other side. The cruise ultimately took us to the barrier between the third and fourth gorges, which meant we did the load/unload dance 6 times round trip. This would have been a considerable amount of portage, had we been in canoes.




Side streams cut down through the sides of the gorge to form little waterfalls. Wherever the walls of the gorge were less than vertical, small beaches had formed.






At the beginning of the 4th gorge, the swirling floodwaters of the Katherine River have eroded these deep circular holes in the sandstone.




This is an absolutely gorgeous Freshwater Crocodile on his way back into the river...





which wasn't too far from the beach where we stopped for a snack and a swim...




which in turn wasn't all that far from the Saltwater Croc Trap. The boat operators assured us that Salties rarely appeared in the gorge because they hated to crawl through the natural barrier of vegetation at the base of the first gorge, and that Freshies don't attack anything bigger than they can swallow whole, but there were still only 5 people in the group (including Darrin) brave enough to go for a swim.




We stuck around for dinner, hoping to do some spotlighting after dark. I've got vegetarian lasagne and a baked potato (2 starches, for some reason) on my plate, and the large, somewhat questionable looking dark things on Darrin's salad are sun-dried tomatoes.




Other than a Flying Fox, dozens of Agile Wallabies, and probably hundreds of Cane Toads, our spotlighting was fruitless, but we did get to enjoy a lovely sunset after dinner.

Merry, merry king of the bush is he...

We spent this morning hiking some of the trails in Nitmiluk (Katherine Gorge) National Park. That is the gorge behind us, having hiked up a steep little path from water level to a nice viewpoint. The water was still exceptionally high from the flooding that had happened some weeks prior.




From the viewpoint we hiked south across the plateau, which was mostly rather hot and exposed, but as we descended the far side we reached a somewhat greener area that was very pretty. If we had more than one full day there, I think we would have taken some of the longer hikes that cut down to swimming beaches along the gorge, as they follow some wetter canyons.




We had lunch at the visitor center's cafe, which was populated with some very aggressive Blue-Faced Honeyeaters. The moment you turned away from your food they would land on your plate. They are very common birds, rather like jays over here, but that doesn't diminish my enthusiasm for them. Their backs are a beautiful rich olive green, which you can't quite see in this photo.




This is a Blue-Winged Kookaburra, cousin to the Laughing Kookaburra who provided the atmosphere in all those old Tarzan movies. I love the proportions of this bird; his enormous head and beak not exactly balanced by a tiny tail and feet. He was also looking for an opportunity to steal a snack.

Star Finches

I am not exactly a hardcore birder; my Australia list is only just over 300 and doesn't include many rarities. The places birds really like to hang out, like sewer treatment plants, are somewhat incompatible with our broader mandate of pretty scenery, biological diversity, interesting geology, and the occasional item of cultural importance. My approach has been to research what might be observed in the parks and areas we plan to visit, and then hope for the best. There were a few special birds I did want to see on this trip, however, and Star Finches were one of them. True to form, they were easily found by trolling the relatively unscenic but very productive farm roads north of Kununurra, and entirely absent from the lovely national parks we visited. In the picture, along with the Star Finches, are some Double Barred Finches (known as Owl Finches in the aviary trade over here). We saw many other finch species on the road-side, including Yellow-Rumped Mannikin and Chestnut Breasted Mannikin.




This was mostly a driving day, as we made the long trek back to Katherine.




We stopped at Victoria River again on the way back for lunch. A fresh barra burger for me, a burger with the lot for Darrin. We did make a last attempt to find a Lilac-Crowned Fairy Wren, but all we spotted was a big croc on the opposite bank of the river.




After we made it to Katherine, there was a smidgen of daylight left, so we ran down to the thermal springs and had a soak. The little man-made waterfall there made nice bubbles and the water was a lovely 90 degrees.