Saturday 26 July 2008

Katherine



We arrived in Katherine on Thursday afternoon and booked into a park which is located a little way out of town with trees and grass – lovely. We have decided to stay three nights to enable us to have a really good look around and to recharge a little .
After we restocked the fridge (and the pantry) we planned our time here and booked in for a Katherine Gorge tour on Saturday which sounded great and certainly was the highlight of our Katherine visit.
On the first night we were talking to our ‘neighbours’ and heard all about how easily he caught prawns at home in Queensland and that he had bags of them in his freezer to enjoy as they travelled around. We had a very enjoyable evening and were overjoyed when our neighbour presented us with a bag of prawns the next morning as they were departing. How good is that! We have enjoyed two evening meals of fresh prawns which has been pretty hard to take!
On Friday we went to a couple of galleries and I was able to talk to two Indigenous women who were painting at one of them. They were lovely ladies and I was amazed at how much work goes into each piece they create. These ladies were dot painting and one complete piece we saw took two months. The piece Marilyn was working on will take her a month. Every dot she placed on the canvas was put there using no more than a two inch piece of twig dipped into paint. She told me that she paints in the colours she likes and the painting she was working on had the story of possums. It was a beautiful piece. I remarked to the gallery director that the paintings would make lovely fabric for patchwork and she told me that she is trying to get some of the ladies to paint onto fat quarters for just that purpose. I have left my details and have been promised photos of the work when available. How exciting!
After lunch we visited the much talked of springs and spent a lovely afternoon relaxing in the warm waters. It really is tough you know, then we had prawns for tea!
Today we went for our cruise down three of the Gorges with our Indigenous guide Russell who has to be a first cousin of Ernie Dingo (we asked, he isn’t). He was great and we had a wonderful time, not only enjoying the beautiful gorges but also learning so much about the local Aboriginal heritage. I have attached a couple of photos. One thing we did think was that we have heard a number of didgeridoo players but none sounded as good as Russell. We watched curiously as Russell placed his instrument into the water and rinsed it at one of our earlier stops and he told us that this enhances the sound and it certainly did for us.
After our cruise we went back to the springs for the rest of the afternoon and now we’re about to have prawns for tea again!
Tomorrow its Litchfield National Park at Bachelor where its unlikely we will not have telephone for a couple of days so the blogs will have to wait, but I’m writing them up regularly or I forget what we have seen.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

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I can't believe you are out of range, now, of all times.
I wanna tell you all the exciting details!
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