Katherine - stay #1

I am writing this at 1.30am (3.30am EST) so please ignore any spelling/grammer mistakes :)

As we knew we would be coming back through Katherine on our way out West, we decided just to spend this few days relaxing and not doing a whole heap of touristy stuff. We stayed at the Manbulloo Homestead which is about 9km out of the town, just above the banks of the Katherine river. It was lovely and peaceful, shaded with beautiful big trees, clean amenities, very friendly staff.

We went into town a couple of times, which is basically one main road (the highway), and just a few smaller streets. There are some pretty cool shops for clothes & souveniers, and also some major shops like woolies & Target Country. There are a lot of Aborigines that just seem to hang around on the pavements and in front of the shops, trying to get some shade, but as far as we could tell this didn't phase anyone apart from one shop keeper who politelt but firmly told a family to stop loitering around )she told me after they left they had been sitting on her outdoor setting she had for sale for a couple of hours!

We also experience Northern territory Alcohol laws. Bottle shops not open until 2pm & having to hand over your drivers licence so they can put you in the data base and track how much alcohol you buy (i don't think the 6 pack we bought made us look very suspicious :P)

We walked along the beautiful Katherine river, where we found some beautiful Jasper rock (google it), and saw croc footprints and tail dragmarks. We also found some ochre that we did Rock paintings/drawings with. We also nealry got bowled over by a small tree brach falling from the sky! We looked up and saw a Cockatoo gnawing at the branches and figured he threw it at us, Alex thought this was hilarious!

In usual Alex style he made friends with everybody at Manbulloo, including Jono, one of the resident staff, who took him for rides on his 4 wheeler into the cow paddocks & to see the homestead helicopters! Even the boss/owner of manbullo fell under Alex's spell and drove him around in his golf buggy a couple of times. Needless to say Alex loved this van park.

The only other real thing we did that was touristy on this stay, was spend some time in the beautiful, natural warm springs, just a couple of KM's out of town. These have been made people freindly by adding stairs and rails, and also & wheelchair ramp. The water is crystal clear, and the little water fall made a great waterslide! However, if there is orange tape across the gate, or a suspicious looking cage in the water i wouldn't swim there if i were you.....snap snap!