Sunday, August 3, 2008

Katherine Day 2

We were off early this morning to Katherine Gorge as we wanted to complete a walk to a look out before heading off on our cruise. This is certainly amazing countryside and is always a surprise to see so much water in an area which you do not expect.



The walk was up a fairly steep hill and was worth the effort to see both the Gorge from a different perspective and also to view the surrounding countryside. We often say that the world is sometimes a small place and while sitting at the lookout we spoke to a couple from Melbourne who lives around our area. The guy had made a delivery to our local nursery the week before, so we found that that South Morang is still on the map.

We decided to do the three Gorge cruise that was to last for three to four hours and allowed you to swim in the Gorge through the day. So after a bit of morning tea, it was a long exhausting walk of about one hour, we headed off to the boat to sit and relax and take in the views.

What spectacular scenery it is. We travelled through Gorge one, there are thirteen in total, before hopping out of the boat to walk to the next Gorge and get on the next boat. In between we saw some of the Aboriginal rock art which was explained to us by our guide for the day.




The second Gorge was just a spectacular as the first but not as long and it did not seem long before we were of the boat and walking to the next Gorge and boat number three.

This was the shortest Gorge of them all, but still worth seeing. We were informed that the Gorge is purely made up of rain water that falls primarily in the wet season and provides water to this area all year round. As a result, the water level varies throughout the year and they have to use different boats during the wet season. At this time, the travel the whole three Gorges without leaving the boat and in a much quicker timeframe. We could only wonder what it would look like of the water level was three to four meters above what it was now.





On the return journey, we pulled into the bank for people to swim in the Gorge if they pleased. To this point we had not seen any crocodiles and so it all appeared to be safe. I could not wait to get in, but not many others joined in. Skinny and Josh stayed to the edge and just got wet, but Chels and I swam out into the middle of the Gorge before returning to the boat. A great experience!


1 comment:

Georgie said...

Hello Everyone,
How are you all? Well thats a silly question but anyways. the gorge sounds like one i visited once. we had to walk up to the next one too.