Katherine Gorges, Edith Falls, Douglas Springs & WTF Bakes Bread!

Hello folks!  Just a short post about our time at Nitmiluk National Park (formerly Katherine Gorge National Park) and a swimming opportunity relinquished.

The town of Katherine is about 100 kilometres up the highway from Mataranka and 300 kilometres south of Darwin.  Katherine is one of the main regional centres in the Northern Territory (4th largest population centre in the NT) and is also the home of the RAAF’s (Royal Australian Air Force) Tindal Base.  For us, the drawcard was to stay for a couple of days in the Nitmiluk National Park to enjoy the scenic beauty of Katherine Gorge and Edith Falls.

'Nitmiluk' means Cicada 

There are a number of ways to see the gorge.  It can be done from any or all of air, land & water.  For those with plenty of time and stamina, you can really get familiar with the gorge by taking a 5 day / 58km hike from one end to the other.  For those with very little time you can take a 30 minute helicopter flight over the gorges.  We chose to do a couple of short hikes to lookouts near our camp on the afternoon of our arrival and then booked a sunrise boat tour for the next morning that took us on a leisurely 2 hour cruise upstream to get within the walls of the first 2 of the 13 gorges in the system and up close to some aboriginal rock art.

Heather at a lookout above the entrance to the gorge

A view of the gorge from our Sunrise Tour boat

Aboriginal rock paintings on the walls of the gorge

Next on our Nitmiluk agenda was Edith Falls.  There are upper falls and lower falls - we hiked to and swam in both of them!  I took the GoPro camera with me to get some video and photos of us and the waterfalls from in the water but encountered some ‘low battery’ issues so I only had limited success.  Despite the low battery I did manage to get a couple of photos before the camera shutdown.

The water was lovely at the base of the falls!

Note to self:  Next time make sure the toys are fully charged before going swimming with them!

Having spent three days seeing the gorge and swimming in the refreshing waters of Edith Falls it was time to resume our nomadic ways and move on.  Next overnight stop was to be Douglas-Daly Hot Springs.  However, before we got there we had to make a short detour off of the highway along the way to visit the last of the Northern Territory Bush Pubs in our book - The Grove Hotel.

It was a dusty dirt track but fortunately there was only 16 kilometres to cover and it wasn’t long before we arrived only to find that it was CLOSED!  Not ‘We are Closed’ as in ‘We have not yet opened for business for the day’ but ‘We are Closed’ as in ‘We have gone out of business so you should just go away’!  So 'go away' we did!

No signature possible here!
At least we have a photo to prove that we visited.

At Douglas-Daly Hot Springs we quickly set-up camp and went to see what these hot springs were all about.  We soon learned that while plenty of people do bathe in the spring waters, you need to be very careful where you get into the water as it can be so hot in places that you can be scalded!  

As we walked downstream to find where the cooler entry point to the waters was we came across a croc trap baited with a pig’s head positioned… IN THE MIDDLE OF THE BATHING AREA! - a little disconcerting to say the least!  (Click on the image below to enlarge it to get a better look at the croc trap).

No problem respecting the Sacred Site but the scalding 
Hot Water, Quicksand & the Croc Trap was too much!

The combination of heavy penalties for setting foot onto a sacred site, potentially scalding waters, a baited croc trap in the only place the water was cool enough to swim, and, the presence of quicksand (that's a new one for me!), was enough to persuade us to give this particular swimming opportunity a miss!  WTF? - Where are The Farrows?, decided to enjoy some down-time at our campsite and bake some sun-dried tomato and olive bread/damper in the camp-oven instead.

Much nicer to eat fresh baked camp-oven bread than
be par-boiled in a hot-spring then eaten by a croc!

Next time around, WTF? - Where are The Farrows? venture deeper into croc country where we actually see a couple of Salties swimming in their river (they can have it!), and we hear tales of Water Buffalo roaming through the campsite at night.

Into the ‘Never Never’…

The further north we travelled the red dirt desert and low lying scrub bushland progressively transitioned towards ‘Savannah’ grassland with its short trees and tall grasses.  In amongst the grasses were ever more termite mounds that seem to establish themselves around, and eventually consume, these short trees.  As you continue to move north, the trees get bigger and so too do the termite mounds.

That is one BIG termite mound!

Do you remember that in a blog or two previous to this one that I stated there wouldn’t be much more blogging about Bush Pubs following the completion of our ‘Pub Crawl thru Queensland’?  Well, while I wasn’t lying to you, there are still over 20 of them for us to visit and for me to tell you about but they are spaced out quite a bit more than the 'one every day or two' that was the case while we were ‘on the crawl’.  It just so happens that we have already come across the first of those 20 or so pubs -  the Larrimah Hotel in the roadside town of Larrimah (where everybody knows your name because the population is just 10).  The Larrimah is famous for one thing and has recently become infamous, for another.

Why is it called the Pink Panther Pub? you ask...

The Larrimah Hotel is ‘famously known’ (perhaps that is a bit of a stretch), as ‘The Pink Panther Pub’ on account of it being painted pink and having many Pink Panthers located both inside and on the grounds outside of the pub.

Pink Panthers are everywhere
making this pub a bit of a Roadside Attraction!

It has also recently become somewhat ‘infamous’ due to the mysterious and unsolved disappearance of one of the towns 10 residents.  A local, and daily drinker at the pub, who, after finishing his ‘customary 8 - 10 beers’, left to go home with his dog on December 16, 2017, has not been seen since.

Police investigations have uncovered ‘bad blood’ existed amongst the residents but, as yet, no charges have been laid.  The ‘surviving’ locals acknowledge that there is a good chance that one of the 10 (or is that now 9?) residents in town is a killer living amongst them!  The Australian Broadcasting Corporation has even made an investigative TV report about it.  For anyone that may be interested in watching, just click on the link below that will take you to YouTube where you can watch the show.

https://youtu.be/9qcTjsXOJQc

After NOT going missing as we walked from the Pink Panther Pub in Larrimah to our caravan parked out the back of the pub, the following morning we made our escape from the ‘Larrimah Killer’ to our next stop in the Elsey National Park on the bank of the Roper River near the town of Mataranka.  Mataranka now markets itself as the ‘Capital of the Never Never’ - more on that later.

MATARANKA -  apital of the Never Never

The first thing we saw upon entering the National Park was a sign warning of the dangers of crocodiles!

Did we escape one killer just to move
straight into the territory of another?

Although Mataranka is well over 200 kilometres from the coast, the Roper River does drain into the ocean and as such, crocodiles can make their way this far inland so it is wise to be ‘Croc Wise’ as the sign suggests.  Which brings me to the next part of our story…

Mataranka is the location of the first natural ‘hot springs’ in the NT that we were to come across during our travels.  These springs are not only warm (about 34C all year round) but they are crystal clear and make for a very nice place to have a swim… if you dare!

The park rangers in the area assure everyone that there are no crocs in the springs but do ask that you ‘please report any sightings you my make’!

The waters were so inviting that we decided to ‘take a chance’ and take a dip.

Hey, there is nobody in there!
Where did everybody go all of a sudden?

Anyway, there were plenty of older folks already in the water and surely we could swim faster than them… (just joking - or am I?).

Elsey National Park is named after Elsey Station that was established in the area during the 1880’s.  An autobiographical book titled ‘We of the Never Never’, written by Jeanie Gunn, is an account of the authors experiences in 1902 living at Elsey Station as the Station Manager’s wife.  Despite being discouraged to ‘go out there’, she was the first white woman to settle in the area.  The book describes her and her husband's journey to the station and settling in.   The book was also made into a film in 1982 and was shot on the location of the former homestead.  We visited a replica of the house that was built for the film.

40C for 6 months of the year and brutal
wet season humidity for 3 of the other 6 months!
Why would you do it?

It would be tough country to live in even now and would have been brutal without any modern conveniences that we take for granted today, e.g.: electricity, refrigeration, communications, vehicles.  The manners and language of the day would have prevented it but I am sure that Jeanie Gunn may have muttered to herself WTF am I doing out here? just once or twice!

Back in the Northern Territory

We de-camped early from our campsite alongside a billabong (waterhole) located just 1 kilometre outside of the small town of Camooweal and hit the road.  As the driver I was happy that we were headed west which mean’t I didn’t have to squint into the early morning sun.  Just 13 kilometres later we reached a sign welcoming us to the Northern Territory.

Welcome to the NT!  It was nice to be back!

The Northern Territory (NT) of Australia is located in the central and central northern region of Australia.  It is bordered by Queensland to the east, Western Australia to the west and South Australia to the south.  Look to the north and all you can see is ocean.  If you jump in a boat and travel far enough you might run into Timor or Indonesia.

The NT is large and largely unpopulated...
but don't think you will have the place to yourself!

It is a big place at 1.42 million km2.  By way of comparison, the Northern Territory is over twice the land area of Texas (696,000 km2), and is larger than all of the Canadian provinces and territories with the exception of Nunavut (2.09 million km2) and Quebec (1.67 million km2).  On the other hand, when it comes to population it is pretty much empty with fewer than 250,000 people living there.  Of these folks, 145,000 live in the capital city of Darwin on the northern coast of the 'Top End'.  Darwin also happens to be our target destination for a couple of weeks in June.  The next couple of blogs will let you know a bit about what we encounter along the 2,000 or so kilometre route we take to get there.

As mentioned above, there is a whole lot of empty space in the NT.  Once we had stopped for a photo of the border sign it was another 250 kilometres until we came to the next sign of human life in the guise of the Barkly Roadhouse.  I thought about topping up the fuel tank but with the asking price for diesel being $2.00 per litre, I quietly muttered “WTF?!” to myself before WTF? - Where are The Farrows?, chose to drive right on by feeling quite happy with themselves having installed a long range fuel tank in the ute and knowing we would easily make it to a fuel stop with less gouging tendencies!

Another couple hundred kilometres down the road and we came to the intersection with the Stuart Highway.  The Stuart Highway is the main highway running N-S in the Northern Territory - it runs right up the middle from the SA border to Darwin.  Our Free Camps app was advising a camp known as ‘The Pebbles’ existed nearby and was just a few kilometres off of the Stuart Highway so we decided to make that home for the night.

We thought that because of the emptiness of the NT and all, and the fact that we were 6 km off of the highway down a dirt road, that we would have ‘The Pebbles’ to ourselves - a private campsite, if you will.  This was looking to be the case until a couple of hours before sunset when about 11 vehicles appeared within the space of an hour.  Oh well!  We chose to find the silver-lining associated with having to share with others and thus took a ‘Safety in Numbers’ point of view of the situation.  

Kunjarra or 'The Pebbles' campsite was located
near the base of some granite boulders.
When we arrived we had it to ourselves.
Same when we departed.
Overnight was a different story!

Following a quiet night our ‘private’ camp emptied out as rapidly as it had filled the previous evening.  WTF - Where are The Farrows? were first to arrive and last to leave!

In the next post, we follow the ribbon of sealed road known as the Stuart Highway northwards towards the ‘Top End’.  WTF? - Where are The Farrows? come across natural hot springs & waterfalls just begging us to take a dip (but are there any crocodiles in residence?).  The termite mounds we see appear to be getting ever larger and one of our Bush Pubs turns out to be part of an unsolved murder mystery!  Stay tuned for more tales from the Never Never... 

Queensland Pub Crawl Comes to it’s End

I don’t know about you but I am happy to report that our Queensland Pub Crawl has come to an end!  It is not that we haven’t had fun visiting all of these places but it is getting difficult to keep finding new things about bush pubs to describe to you the reader.  Nonetheless, I will finish the job that I started (even if I do go lightly on the pub descriptions)…

We arrived in Longreach in central western Queensland to re-supply the van with food and water, etc, and get some maintenance done on the vehicle (replaced front brake pads).  The town is the home of the Australian Stockman’s Hall of Fame and is well worth a visit.

Bronze statue of Stockman out the front of the Stockman's Hall of Fame

While in the region we drove about 100 kilometres to the east to visit the town of Barcaldine and it’s ‘Tree of Knowledge’.  The Tree of Knowledge was the shady gathering place / headquarters for striking shearers in 1891 and now symbolises the foundation of organised representation of labour in Queensland.  The tree itself was a grand old Ghost Gum that was over 100 years old at the time of the shearer’’s gatherings and was added to the Queensland Heritage Register in 1992.

Unfortunately, it was poisoned and killed in 2006 by an act of senseless but wilful vandalism - not much ‘knowledge’ deployed in performing that low deed.  The perpetrator has not been found.  Now all that remains on the site is a monument.

The 'Tree of Knowledge' monument in Barcaldine

There is however, a small part of a happy ending to offer...  Before the tree was officially declared dead, i.e.: while it was visibly sick and dying but not yet dead, several cuttings were taken from the tree which were successfully nurtured and re-planted.  These are now growing in and around the town of Barcaldine.

Upon departing Longreach the next three, and last, pubs on this part of our journey were visited. In order these were: The Middleton Hotel, The Blue Heeler Pub, and the Gregory Downs Hotel.

Middleton Hotel - 2 May 2019

Blue Heeler Hotel, Kynuna - 3 May 2019

Gregory Downs Hotel - 7 May 2019

After spending the night out the back of the Gregory Downs Hotel we travelled to the town of Camooweal just 13 km inside the Queensland / Northern Territory border and thereby wrapped up our Pub Crawl through Queensland.

In summary, our pub crawl took us a month to complete.  We visited 14 Bush Pubs and travelled 4,866 km in doing so.

It was a long and winding route through
outback Queensland but we 'got er done!'

In the next episode when you ask WTF? - Where are The Farrows?, I will no longer be able to answer your question by saying ‘Queensland’.  We are Northern Territory bound!

London, Paris, Thargomindah?

When you think of major cities of the world the likes of; London, Paris, New York, etc, typically spring to mind.  You don’t often hear people citing ‘London, Paris & Thargomindah’ as a peer grouping.  When WTF? - Where are The Farrows? first heard this trio mentioned in the same breath they thought (because they would never say it out aloud), firstly, ‘WTF (Where The…) is Thargomindah?’ and secondly, ‘WTF (Who The…) are they trying to kid?’.

Well, dear reader, WTF? - Where are The Farrows? now knows the answer to the first question (because we have been there), however, for your benefit, the answer is illustrated in the image below:

Located in SW Queensland atop Australia's Great Artesian Basin, Thargomindah is 1,000km from Brisbane & 1,200km from Adelaide

The answer to the second thought may surprise you as much as it did us - They are not trying to kid anyone!  Please allow me to fill you in…

In 1891 drilling commenced on a bore (that’s a ‘well’ for the folks in Nth America and elsewhere), to supply the town with water.  In 1893 an exceptionally good supply was struck at a depth of 808 metres (2,650 feet) with water at a temperature of 84C being pushed to the surface by the natural artesian pressure.  Thargomindah was the first town to have reticulated Artesian Bore water.  The bore was also the source of energy for Australia’s first hydro-electric power scheme when in 1893, Thargomindah’s streets were lit by means of a generator coupled to a water turbine that was driven by the bore’s natural water pressure.  Thargominda was the ‘Third after London, One Day after Paris’ to have street lighting generated by hydro power!

The artesian bore and Thargomindah's original hydro power plant

Home of Australia's first hydro-electric power plant.
Who would've guessed?!

I thought the ‘third in the world’ claim to fame could have perhaps been displayed a little more prominently on the sign placed at the entrance to the old Thargomindah Hydro Power Plant but maybe that is just me?  Look closely at the lower left of the photo of the sign below (click on the image to enlarge it if that will help you), and you can see the words ‘Third after London, One Day after Paris’.

Bush modesty at it's best!  Click on image to enlarge
in order to read small print at centre right:
'Third after London One day after Paris'

Following a night in the metropolis of Thargomindah where we enjoyed electric lighting inside our caravan (because the mosquitoes were too thick to enjoy anything at all sitting outside), we rolled westward to the Noccundra Hotel in search of the next autograph in our Bush Pubs book.

I believe I have mentioned in previous posts that the flies and mozzies in these parts, after the better than typical rains, are abundant!  As we arrived at the Noccundra Hotel during daylight hours, it was the flies that greeted us.  Heather broke out the metal detector and her bug-hood and tried to do some detecting around our campsite.  She soon gave up.  The flies were too thick!

Flies and even more flies!

The Noccundra Hotel is different to most of the Queensland pubs we have visited far in that it was made of stone - built to last in 1883!  She is a handsome old girl from the outside but not much to speak of on the inside - oh well!.

Most things in Queensland were built out of timber.
Most things in Queensland have been eaten by termites!
The Noccundra Hotel was built out of stone in 1883 and
is still looking good.

One of two ‘claims to fame’ for the town of Eromanga where our next pub was to be found is that it is ‘The Furthest Town from the Sea’ in Australia.  The other is that Eromanga is/was the home of Australia’s largest dinosaur.  We requested and received a signature in our book from the publican and had a chat over the obligatory cold beer before heading back to camp.

The Furthest Town (and thus Pub) from the Sea

The last pub in the SW corner of Queensland that we were to hit during this part of our tour was the Yaraka Hotel in Yaraka.  Due to the recent wet weather and the subsequent road closures we could not take the most direct route from Eromanga to get there.  The Stonehenge publican (publicans are always the fount of all local knowledge), assured us that our vehicle would be able to get there but we "certainly would not be able to tow the caravan there" on the only route that was open to us which was an ill-defined track across 130 km of farmland.  So, we parked in the shire-provided caravan site across from the pub, unhitched the van and set off down the 130km long farm track to get to Yaraka.

Upon arrival we found a sign on the door indicating the bar was closed for ‘Siesta Time’!  WTF?  It was getting late in the day and we did not want to wait too long to start our return trip as driving into the setting sun on a poorly defined track with kangaroos and cattle all over the place is no fun.  At the same time, we didn’t want to leave empty handed.  Luckily for us, the publican, Chris, showed up and after exchanging brief pleasantries, we secured his signature and then had to leave.  Long story short, we made it home with an autograph and a whole lot of grasshopper guts splattered across the front of the vehicle.

Chris was more than happy to sign our book
after the effort we had put in to get to his pub!

Out the front of The Yaraka Hotel

The next episode of WTF? - Where are The Farrows? sees us in the town of Longreach (and surrounds) to re-supply after a couple of weeks out in the SW Queensland wilderness.