6 - 2024 - Alice Springs to Katherine, NT

 

Entry 6 – 2024 – Alice Springs to Katherine, NT

We filled the tow tugs fuel tank, prior leaving Alice Springs. We were heading north and fuel prices were about 40-50% a litre dearer at the small service centres along our route. The next major town with a more reasonable fuel price was the town of Katherine, about 1,200 kilometres up the road.

Just north of Alice Springs the cloud formation changed. It looked like an endless rolling cloud band, similar to an ocean wave pattern. The only other time we could remember seeing a similar cloud pattern was close to the Australian northern coastline near the town of Karumba in Queensland.

Up the road a bit from Alice Springs is another “psychological point,” The “Tropic of Capricorn,” at Latitude 22-442028 and Longitude 133-833111, providing thoughts we are getting closer to the equator with the anticipation of warmer weather.

We shared the long-distance driving duties, regularly switching drivers.

There was a stop at the Alieron service centre.

You know when you are approaching the northern areas of Australia. The unique termite mounds start popping up on the landscape.

A stop at the Devils Marbles, (Karlu Karlu/Devils Marbles Conservation Reserve) where we walked one of the trails amongst its special boulders. Our bodies welcomed the hours exercise, stretching out, alleviating our aching, cramped body parts.

Normally during periods of “just driving,” the distance we cover in a day can vary considerably. There are the daily variables, our personal capabilities at the time, road and weather conditions can have an impact. The performance of the tow tug/caravan, another example from the two weeks previous, when we got horribly bogged enroute.

Northern Territory National Parks, provide a campground at Devils Marbles which we had frequented previously. This day we were travelling well and thought the Devils Marbles campground sounded good, within our distance’s capabilities for the night.

Previously, on arrival at the campground, we would find a spot to set camp and place our camping fee into a box. With the introduction of a new, computerised system, you were now required to book and pay in advance.

First, we were in need to find a service centre with phone/internet reception. Another scarce commodity when travelling in outback Australia. It was about 12.30 pm when we came across phone reception. After negotiating the not so user-friendly National Parks computer system we found all the allocated sites were booked for the night. During the rest of the week there were plenty of vacant sites at Devils Marbles.

On our circuit walk around the Devils Marbles we passed through the campground. It was approaching dusk and the campground still had about 15 unoccupied camp sites. Unfortunately, this was a common issue with the pre-booking system, (nightly, many vacant sites,) with the authorities seemingly unresponsive to ideas for a solution. Grrr, which sounds like the same Grrr expressed by many others.

At least there are many other special locations you can enjoy whilst camped for a night. Even when the overnight temperatures hover in the single digit degrees. It must be cold with the appearance of external condensation on our caravan’s outer skin displaying the placement of our internal support structure.

There was an opportunity to camp on a disused World War Two constructed aircraft runway. Just another unique special location.

We were travelling well, covering our daily minimum driving distances easily. We did have some good incentive, the warmer weather conditions, beckoning us, up the road a bit. We decided we could arrive at our target area with a couple of days to spare before attending our prebooked locations.

At about 8.30 am we arrived at the town of Mataranka where we jumped into the naturally occurring warm waters of a local spring fed pool. Ah, it felt good, soothing our weary bodies. An hour & half later with wrinkly body parts we extracted ourselves from the beautiful spring waters.

A few kilometres up the road was another warm water oasis, “Bitter Springs.” We drove into the nearby caravan park, obtaining a site for a couple of nights and spent more time in the Bitter Springs sensational waters.

From our caravan it was an easy near kilometre walk to where you can slide your body into the warm spring waters of Bitter Springs.

There is a nice, scenic walking trail through the caravan park, then along the paved road surface into Elsey National Park.

Upon arriving at Bitter Springs, there are some strategically placed platforms where you enter the warm flowing waters. Many people utilise foam noodles as a floatation device as we did and you gently move along a winding stream surrounded by a magnificent setting. After around a 15–20-minute duration in the water you exit the water and walk for about 2-3 minutes back to the starting point and do it all over again and again.

It was wonderful to be in our target area. The day time and night time temperatures had become quite palatable, much appreciated by our bodies.

Leaving Mataranka, we became aware it was a Monday public holiday. We had planned for a big shop up the road a bit at the good-sized town of Katherine.

Our previous experiences with public holidays showed most shops to be closed. We still needed to prop at Katherine (with fingers crossed) to see if this was still the case. Wow, we were pleased to find an open Woolworths food store. Adding to our pleasure, most shelves had stock available. Previous visits to this same store showed many empty shelves. Our arrival timing must have coincided with a recent delivery. Yippee. Though it was the busiest supermarket store we had ever experienced. People were jostling and acting crazy. Just the wait to get to a checkout was time consuming.

Our bill was near $250. Wow, oh wow. We did stock up with our food requirements for the next couple of weeks.

With the tow tugs fuel tank refilled we headed up the road to our next target location of Nitmiluk National Park where we set camp at Leliyn Edith Falls campground.