16th February 2010
We both had a much better night’s sleep than on our previous Ghan journey with room to lie down and the train rocking us gently to sleep, before we knew it we were awoken by the train manager announcing the first breakfast sitting (for gold and platinum customers).
Overnight we passed through the remote mining town of Tennant Creek and were well on our way to Katherine where the outback meets the tropics. The landscape had become even greener and there were loads more trees and pools of standing water.
We arrived into Katherine early, a town which somehow seemed cleaner, without the red dust that permeates Alice Springs. The train stops here for 4 hours so we had booked a transfer to Katherine Gorge, a deep gorge cut through the sandstone which features in many aboriginal dreamtime stories.
Katherine Gorge, now known by its aboriginal name of Nitmiluk Gorge since the successful return of the land, is a magnificent twelve kilometre gorge carved by the Katherine River through the Arnhem Land plateau. Described as 13 gorges, it is in fact one continuous cleft, turning left and right along fault lines.
As we got off the shuttle bus, the air was filled with flying fruit bats who had been disturbed from roosting when their tree apparently fell down. The noise and sight was incredible. At the start of the walk we were greeted with the news that there would be no swimming today due to the possibility of salt-water crocodiles in the vicinity.
We made the steep climb to the viewing platform above the gorge which afforded us spectacular views of the full flowing river hemmed in by sheer ochre cliffs. This was our first taste of top-end humidity so we elected to return to the visitor centre after the walk where we were able to get more information about the local indiginous people, the fauna and flora around the gorge.
While we were waiting for the bus to take us back to the train we spotted a kookabura sat in a gum tree. The bird life around the gorge is quite prolific with spotted harriers, peregrine falcons, crenellas and black cockatoos which we had seen from the bus on the journey in, to name just a few. On the journey out, another treat, a jabiru, or black-necked stork stood calmly in one of the roadside pools.
Back on the train and time to catch up with some blogs and plan our trip to Darwin while the rain started to come down outside. The forecast is stormy for the next few days so I’m guessing this is what we’ll have to get used to. It was quite an amazing site to watch the rain pound down outside the window while we were rocking past giant termite mounds and running rivers.
The train arrived in Darwin which is the Ryan Air version of Darwin, that is about 30kms outside the actual city itself necessitating a shuttle bus. 20 minutes later we were in the city centre and headed for our hotel, again experiencing that tropical humidity, the air-conditioning of the hotel was certainly welcome.
