Time for a change.....

The Bungle Bungle’s fire is worse than they told us- the road is unlikely to be open for a few days, so it is time to move on and miss a very interesting detour.

Our decision is to go towards Darwin, on quite a good road, the Victoria Highway. It is around 950kms in total, and with the visits we want to make will take us four days. Our first day is the longest, and quite a boring long road, to break it up we called at Lake Argyll, the largest freshwater lale in Australia, man made, and part of the Ord River Project from 1969. It feeds and irrigates millions of acres of farmland, and is very impressive.

The day ended at a roadhouse whose poster told us it was “under new wife”! An excellent meal there, very reasonable, and we retired early, ready for another early start in the morning.

As we drove on we saw a few memorials to the early explorers, we stopped to check out the history, and to look at the views of the Victoria River, tidal and full of salties so we resisted the urge to have a dip.

We have now crossed into Northern Territory, another state, and we had to change our clocks by one and a half hours. Weird! We had been used to going to bed at around 8 o’clock, and up before five with the dawn chorus, but now it was up at 6-15, and in bed at 9-30. Exactly the same times really, just a difference on the clock.

The second night was spent at Edith Falls, just north Of Katherine, the largest town we had been in since we left Derby, and one that we visited two years ago with David and Mildred. We weren’t impressed then, and we passed through the town quickly, and on to the falls which are 25k off the main road, the

Stuart Highway

, which runs from Darwin to Adelaide, some 2000k. It passes through Alice Springs, about halfway along.

As we arrived at the campsite we experienced our first rainfall since leaving home ten weeks ago, and what a downpour. Just as we got our roof tent and awning up it came down in torrents, with almost a river running under the car. It was a major thunderstorm, and rained off and on all night, we were told 6mm came down overnight. I hope this is not the start of the wet!

But tomorrow dawned bright and dry, and extremely humid. Sweat was pouring off us even before we dressed, so we took off for our early morning walk across the top of the falls, took us about an hour and a half, and then dived in for a welcome dip before breakfast.

As the roof tent was rather wet after the storm, we had to wait a bit before we could pack up. In this humidity things don’t dry easily even in the sun, but we got there eventually.

Unfortunately while zipping up the cover we got it jammed solid, couldn’t get it one way or the other, so we had to travel with the cover partly unzipped. Not a problem, unless it rained, when our bed would get extremely wet.

We were lucky however, and we made it to our next stop, Litchfield National Park. What awaits us here?