March 23, 24 & 25

When we were staying at Wycliffe Wells, we took a run up the highway to see the Devil's Marbles, they are really amazing to see.  Everything around is flat for miles and miles and all of a sudden you see these outcroppings:

We wandered around the area for a while taking lots of pictures, however, it is taking a long time to download where we are so am only putting in a couple.  It was really a strange feeling being the only people in the area. The tourists are next out in about 2 weeks and then we will have to make reservations everywhere we go.

There are outcroppings like this on both sides of the road just in this one area and then everything is totally flat again.  Very strange!!!

Just as we were leaving it started to rain.  By the time we got back to the campground it had stopped.  There was a restaurant at the campground, we went in to keep cool, had a couple of beer and the best Chinese food we had in a long time.  After we got back in the van it started to rain again, and this time it rained a little heavier, just enough to cool it down for sleeping.

I think I have already mentioned my experience with the frog(s).

We drove through a little place called Tennant Creek and met with one of the locals, he let me take a picture of his vehicle.

The majority of vehicles here have bull bars in front for the kangaroo encounters in the early evening and early mornings.  He was quite proud of his!

We drove past the Tropic of Capricorn, now we are in the real heat, wet too...

We stopped at a place called Daly Waters, they have a very famous pub there, it holds the oldest liquor licence in Australia, granted in 1835 or thereabouts.  Everyone stops there along the way and leave certain mementos:

One can only hope these are extras!

Those are dollar bills in the background, behind the sign.

They even have familiar people drinking in the pub...oh, it's Dalton sitting in front of a shoe tree!

We met a couple who have been travelling around Australia for the past two years.  The bought an old bus that had been converted, it has a trailer with a car on it that they pull behind.  They have been working along the way to make gas money for the bus.  Nashwa and Bob, she is from Egypt and arrived in Australia when she was 4.  We also met up with the couple we met in Alice, Elwin and Denice.  Apparently this happens a lot when people are travelling, you are often running into each other along the way.  It makes the evening very pleasant because you exchange stories and you get to hear about a lot of places not to miss along the way.

Our next stop was Mataranka where they have mineral pools, the water temperature is 35 degrees which is not a lot different than the air temperature as it happened to be 32 that day.  It was a very nice pool, however, the down side was that the area was full of flying foxes aka bats - there were thousands of them.

The smell of bat guana, uuhgg!

The pool was nice though if you could get past the smell!

Next we arrived in Katherine, a lovely town the biggest since Alice Springs.  We had to do a quick grocery shop and fill up with diesel before rushing out to do the Katherine Gorge tour.  We took a boat through one of thirteen gorges, at the end we had a 400 m hike to pick up the next boat for the next gorge.  It was a beautiful trip.

It really is pretty amazing to see!

This looks like a lovely mist, however, our boatman put the front end of the boat right under the waterfall and a bunch of us got soaked, it was coming down pretty good.  It did feel wonderful.

Along the way we met a couple of "Freshies" they are fresh water crocks and are supposed to be more scared of us than we are of them, however, no one was willing to find out.  This one was just laying there in the sun until we got really close and sent it in the water.  We only saw 2 and one was really small.

After we left the gorge we stopped at a Top Tourist Caravan Park, it was very nice, beautiful pool.  

The first thing I wanted to do after our experience at the hot pool, was wash our clothes and towels, so I put the clothes in the washer, a beautiful front end loader, put in my money and 1/2 hour later went to get them out to put them on the line....half way through taking them out I saw a frog sticking to the inside of the washer.  I went to get Dalton, I wasn't going to touch the thing, it was still alive, but you could see it had been on the ride of it's life, can you imagine going through those spin cycles, and the soap taste it must have had in it's mouth.  I hope this is the last experience I have with frogs.  It would happen to be one of the endangered species.  Needless to say, the clothes went back in the wash, sans frogs.