Our day started at 6am to meet the bus connecting us to the Yellow Waters Cruise. Suprisingly, people came out of the woodwork and the cruise was not one boat but three. Each of the flat bottom tinnies held around 40 people and for two hours, we watched and listened as our guide directed the tinnie along the banks and pointed out beautiful birds, crocs, fish and plants.
With the cruise ended, we went back to our camps to pack up, eat breakfast, and have showers. By 10am when we were organised, it was too hot to think about anymore bushwalking or sightseeing and agreed to drive right out of
Kakadu and onto
Katherine.
Although it was 41 degrees at lunchtime when we arrived in
Katherine we agreed to stay at the local caravan park and spend a few hours in
the pool instead of pushing on to a
bush camp a couple of hundred kilometres away. Our fridge couldn't keep up with the heat unless we were driving so we bought a powered site and used the 240v to run the fridge and connect the car battery charger. We were surprised to find very few shops were open on a Sunday so we couldn't even replace our broken UHF aerial so it was best to wait in
Katherine until the next day anyway. We put some block ice in a bucket and enjoyed chilled drinks and good conversation over dinner with Mark and Sharon - we even discovered that Mark is the same star sign as David and Sharon is the same star sign as me. The evening seemed very pleasant but our temperature gauges showed it was still 30 degrees in our cars. David and I couldn't handle sleeping in those conditions and within a few hours, the bedsheet was saturated with our sweat. We climbed out of the car, dragging our thermarests, pillows, and lay on the concrete under the stars. Finally, we had a pleasant night's sleep and didn't even need a mossie net.
The following day we found
Katherine to be amazingly
well supplied for outback travellers with genuine requirements. In an old shed, we found an auto electrician who had the solution to our fridge battery problems. David bought the parts and installed the high capacity relay and high current cable to improve the charge reaching the battery. This little problem had both Mark and David testing and twiddling for the last few weeks and this was their solution. We hoped it would work...