Through Timber Creek

From Katherine, we headed west. Gradually, the scenery changed as more and more rocky outcrops began to rise either side of the road. We stopped in Timber Creek to top up on diesel and take in some of the countryside.

A few kilometres out of town we drove into Policeman's Point - a high point overlooking the Victoria River. Ryan managed to spot a croc sunning itself on the gravel below (I missed it while I was searching through the truck for my hat)(turned out to be already on my head)(sigh). I took a random photo of a bird resting in the shadows on a distant branch - after looking at the photos properly at home, I discovered that it was actually a rainbow kingfisher - quite a beautiful bird.

We took another detour up to Telecom Hill which offered expansive views over the river and township below. The countryside was surprisingly green. We figured there must have been a decent amount of rain in the preceding weeks, although to us it was very much hot and dry, with nothing but clear blue skies.

We had a brief lunchstop at Big Horse Creek - a camping ground and boat ramp down alongside the river. Venturing out onto the boat ramp gave a good view of the Bradshaw Bridge - made "famous" in our minds by my parent's story of having walked across to the locked gate on the other side (leads to Bradshaw Field - a military training area) and randomly meeting a relative of a friend back home in Parkes. Small world...

We were also on a mission to see Gregory's Tree - a big old boab inscribed by Augustus Gregory, an explorer who led an expedition to the "interior" from Brisbane in 1854. The tree marks one of their basecamps from which they explored the Victoria River and traced Sturt's Creek for 483km until it disappeared into the Tanami Desert (impressive). We were quite surprised (after seeing plenty of photos) at how big the tree actually was in real life. It was all fenced off with a viewing platform along one side, so no chance of standing next to it for a bit of perspective. It also had us pondering whether in another hundred years people would come to see the many other boab's inscribed by passing tourists alongside the highway (come see "Shazza's" tree...).

From there, we drove the rest of the way to Keep River National Park and set up our first campsite for the trip. Far from our fears of rain, the biggest problem we encountered was the heat. We didn't know it at the time, but this first sweaty night would turn out to be the coolest of our trip (sigh).