Day 244 – 15th September 2018 – Darwin, Nitmiluk (Katherine) Gorge

Kat and Angry don’t like kyaking, so they booked themselves onto a boat Tour down the Katherine Nitmiluk Gorge and had to be on the boat at 9am.  So Col and I had a bit of a lay in and a really relaxing morning.  Just what we needed after the busy week and rush to get here.

The park is beautiful.  It is a bit pricey but Col and I both loved it and would like to come back.  The bird life is incredible and we enjoyed sitting around watching the Rosellas, Wattlebirds and many birds we didn’t know the names of.  There were also lots of Kangaroos wandering around too.  We had breakfast and just chilled out, a great way to start the day.  We also went for a bit of a wander around to see the park and go to the Visitor Centre to find out where we had to go for our Canoe Hire tour that afternoon.  The Visitor Centre was beautiful and had a deck overlooking the Katherine Gorge, so we decided to grab a coffee and sit out on the deck to drink it.

There is a pool in the middle of the park with a bistro that you can go and have dinner there.  They have live music playing too.  Or you can wander over to the visitor centre for meals as well.  A great set up.

We then went home to get ready for our canoe and got changed and organised then headed to the meeting point.  We got on a boat for the first gorge as there are sometimes Salties in this section so no one is allowed to kayak or swim.  They dropped us off at the end of the gorge and we walked to the beginning of the second gorge where the kayaks and canoes are.  Col and I had hired a double and paddled along the second gorge, then got out and carried the canoe across land to the third gorge.

The place is incredibly beautiful and we loved the day exploring the Gorges.  On the way back col went for a swim and did his impersonation of a jumping Croc.

When we got to the cross over from the third to the second gorge, we had to get out and carry the kayak over the land.  We put the kayak in the water and we were just getting in when we  saw a snake fast tracking it towards us.  We thought it was a brown snake so we were being very cautious as it was trying to get under the kayak to hide.  We didn’t want that scenario as it would have been very risky for us to get into the kayak with a snake under it.  So Col grabbed the paddle and tried to redirect the snake away from the kayak.  We were up on a ledge and the snake was not aggressive.  Pretty cool to see actually.

While Col went off exploring, I met a lovely lady who was studying medicine and working in Darwin.  She told me a story that happened to her a couple of weeks earlier when she went hiking on her own in Litchfield National Park for a few days and got lost.  She ran out of water and was suffering from heat stroke and became really confused and distressed.  She was lost for about 7 hours without water before finding the track and other people.  Just a really good reminder to be safe in these remote areas.  She was an experienced hiker and took plenty of provisions, but you need a way to contact the outside world if something out of the ordinary happens.  Having said that, it is pretty impressive that a female on her own will hike in that sort of country on their own for days at a time, carrying your tent and provisions on your back.  I wouldn’t be brave enough to do it, that is for sure!

There are fresh water Crocs in the gorges, which are not aggressive and it is ok to swim with them.  They still get pretty big though and will protect themselves if you provoke them, but otherwise they leave you alone if you leave them alone.  There are crocodile nesting signs along the way with a warning not to go up there.  The tracks near the sign reinforce this.

In the evening we went back to camp and Kat and Angry cooked us a beautiful dinner  and we sat up chatting well into the night.  All in all it was definitely worth the effort to make it here last night and I would be keen to come back again in the future and spend some more time here exploring the park.  A really beautiful place.