13/12/08 The start of our long journey south to Uluru! We stopped at Katherine for that night and the one after; the third largest town in Northern Territory after Darwin and Alice Springs. It was quite a small place, surrounded by forest. Like in Darwin, the only homeless people we saw were Aborigines. It was quite surreal to walk down the street, because Christmas songs and carols would suddenly ring out from loudspeakers on the street light poles, and this was in great heat and bright summer sunshine! The afternoon we arrived, we went down the hot springs that we had seen advertised at our campsite, but they were a bit of a disappointment - you couldn't swim in the bit that actually bubbled up (because of leeches, a boy told us), and the bit we could and did swim in was really just a dirtyish deep stream which didn't even feel hot, only lukewarm. We checked each other over for leeches when we got out, just in case, but we were free of them luckily.

14/12/08 We went into the Katherine Outback & Heritage Museum in the morning, consisted of the former telegraph repeater station, a building with the plane of the first Royal Flying Doctor, Clyde Fenton, the main building, which had about life in Katherine from the time it first rose out of the outback, a video and photos of the time Katherine was comepletely flooded on Australia Day 1997, biographies of notable locals, and a collection of Aboriginal spears, throwing sticks etc. After this, we had a walk round town, but we found that most of the shops were closed, as well as the library and the internet cafe/Aboriginal art gallery I had spotted and wanted to visit. It was odd, but although we could see from this that it must be a Sunday, I had thought it was a Thursday or Friday, and Dave had thought it was a Saturday! Shows how easy it is to lose track of what day it is, when travelling.

We went back to the caravan/campsite and jumped in the pool, and then while Dave stayed around the tent/car, I went for a walk down the riverside, behind the campsite, with my camera. It was really sunny and hot, so I thought I would be able to get some good photos. I walked along and down until I reached the bridge, which I crossed. There were signs warning about how crocodiles may move undetected in the river, but I still saw two girls swimming around in it, despite this and the fact that the river was very rough where they were. The river and the surrounding trees were beautiful though, with sandbanks next to parts of the river, and some of the gum trees had trunks completely stripped of all bark, so they looked really white. I saw lorikeets fly between the branches of the trees above me, and heard the constant noise of the flying foxes. (I never actually saw any of these, but they sounded a lot like grasshoppers, surprisingly.) As it started to get dark it began spitting and then pouring with rain, so when there was a break in it we made a dash from the car, where we'd been reading, to the tent. Luckily, despite the sunshine I had guessed it might rain earlier, so we had put our table and chairs, and our swimming stuff drying out on them, away into the car before the rain had begun. We'd also managed to have dinner (vegetable soup with tinned tomatoes and tuna mixed in) and put the stuff away from that, as well. I didn't get a very good night, though, because every now and then I felt a drop of rain land on me which had come through the sides of the tent somehow. Even after I moved away into a different part, I didn't get to sleep for ages and then woke up very early.