15 - Kununurra W.A. to Katherine N.T.

June 2016 - 12/6/16 

After a couple of days at Keep River National Park we decided to continue east towards Katherine, primarily as we had already consumed a fair bit of our ice-cream and we needed to pace our consumption till the next shop location about 500 kilometres drive down the road. 

Travelling through Keep River NP

We managed nearly 10 kilometres along the main road from the National Park when we saw a sign for Zebra Rock Mine and campground. A quick discussion between us, yes let’s have a look and we did stay the night.

 It was a very commercial small time operation where your movements were limited to the fenced in smallish bush campground. The operators were a bit over the top promoting and pushing their wares and tours. 

They did provide a nice café type area offering free self-serve coffee or tea and naturally they would deliver the best scones ever with jam & cream for $3 each. We did participate in the scones and free tea enjoying chatting with other campers. While in the café area you could openly hear staff talking with other arrivals and it was blatantly clear to us they had no scruples when it came to speaking the truth. In a sense we did enjoy our time there, finding it quite amusing observing staff tactics, preying on the west bound travellers who had no idea what was available about 70 kilometres further down the road at Kununurra. 

Zebra Rock Mine café with nice rock tables

Continuing east we stopped at a road side stop for a loo break at about 11 am only to find it nearly ¾ full with people in the process setting up for the night. The peak season of the travelling tourist was definitely upon us for the northern areas of Australia and it felt a little disconcerting. We knew the next location of a reasonable stop over within our range was somewhat chaotic when we stopped there a month earlier and we preferred to avoid the frenzied atmosphere of this nature. Thus a little further along the road we found a disused road works gravel pit and that became our location for the evening. 

What a relaxing stopover. We made a fire, cooking tea in our camp fire oven. 

We moved on to Timber Creek exploring its other attractions we had missed on our previous visit. There wasn’t a lot to see or do and the atmosphere created by chaotic caravan drivers jockeying for positions near the fuel station disregarding all laws and common sense helped us with our decision to get out of Timber Creek ASAP. Even travelling along the highway out of town we saw a caravan cutting across a grassed area off to the side of the road at 45 degrees toward us and if we hadn’t braked they would have crashed into the side of us when they drove onto the highway without slowing or looking. 

With the silly season upon us our conversation now included strategies we could utilise dealing with our fellow wayward travellers. 

We decided it was time for some R & R of sorts and we thought the walk at Joe Creek in the Judbarra Gregory National Park we had missed on our way across would do it for us. 

What a great walk it was. There were plenty of steps up the steep slope to the base of the escarpment where you scampered across a base of fallen rocks along the face of the escarpment. It was a great setting walking amongst palms at the base of a towering colourful rock face. As an added bonus there was a reasonable amount of aboriginal rock art still distinguishable along the cliff face. We so enjoyed this walk.

 

This walk revealed our fitness level had certainly improved with all our walking over the last month. It was graded as a level four track requiring a reasonable level of fitness to complete which we managed without much fuss. 

We found another gravel pit for our overnight stop in a beautiful setting with forested hills all around us, all to ourselves and it was peaceful. This more than likely was to be our last quiet night for the next couple of months as we were expecting the volume of people to dramatically increase around us once we start to travel between Katherine and Darwin through a much publicised area including the likes of Kakadu National Park. 

Once again we had encountered a long weekend with closed shops along with the possibility of no accommodation available, so we propped at a road side stop about 60 kilometres from Katherine for the night. That makes a total of 4 times a long weekend has thrown us out in the last 6 weeks. 1^st time at Tennant Creek (Anzac day) waiting for our mail, 2^nd arriving at Katherine (May Day), 3^rd travelling to Kununurra (Western Australia day) to address our battery issues and now Katherine again (Queens Birthday). It almost makes you wish you were working again getting paid for a long weekend. Not really!