Sunday, May 30, 2010

30th May 2010 - Lake Argyle to Katherine

Distance travelled: 522
Cumulative distance: 10702

Woke up early to a cloudy sky??? This is our "box" room. Breakfast at the Lake Argyle "resort" didn't start until 7.30am so we went for ride over the dam wall to take a few pictures. The dam wall is quite small and insignificant considering the amount of water it holds back. After breakfast we visited the old Durack homestead that had been saved from the flooding of Lake Argyle. They only managed to save the main building as the lake filled quicker than estimated (3 years instead of 5). The Duracks were an irish family that settled in the area in the late 1800s. They established Argyle downs, a huge cattle station which is now at the bottom of Lake Argyle due to the damming of the Ord river. At the homestead there was a family tree and we think we found Luke's father on it. According to the lady in charge of the homestead there are a lot of Duracks and they have regular getogethers in the area. We eventually left Lake Argyle at 9am and headed for Katherine in the Northern Territory. When we crossed the WA/NT border the time zone changed and we had to move our watches forward 90 minutes. This meant we had to put the hammer down to get to Katherine at a decent hour some 522kms away. The speed limit in NT is 130kph which helped. We were held up for half an hour as a road gang was resealing the road ... both sides at the same time??? The scenery we passed was quite spectacular with high ridges surrounding long valleys. This is still part of the Devonian reef. The weather cleared to a bright sunny day with a pleasant cooling breeze. We didn't stop much for photo opportunities because of our time constraints. We arrived in Katherine around 4pm and headed for the Tourist Information centre to check on tours to the Katherine Gorge. We booked ourselves on one for tomorrow afternoon. The motel we are staying at has access to warm springs which we will sample tomorrow after our excursion. We decided to buy our dinner at Woolies and have a barbecue at the motel. There were no cooking or eating utensils provided so we reverted to our camping kit. At least the barbecue worked OK. I had to use my camp stove to boil the sweet corn. Colin found a friendly green tree frog in our toilet cistern!! After dinner we caught up on our blog and Colin figured out the rules to the new card game, Cribbage we are going to play!!

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