The trip home

We were tossing up several possibilities for our drive home - maybe down through Hall's Creek and via Wolf Creek Meteor Crater (loooooong drive, not sure which roads were open), maybe via Gregory National Park (same story with the roads and probably needed more time to explore the place properly) or maybe just overnight in Katherine.

In the end we decided to head back towards Katherine, but to see the Flora River Nature Reserve along the way. This involved a detour of around 50km each way from the highway on a road that would become closed as soon as the wet season set in. The campground at the end looked very much abandoned, overgrown and neglected - maybe they had decided to close down already? Our original plan to camp there overnight suddenly seemed a little less attractive.

The main attraction of the park was a series of cascades in the river where dams of tufa had gradually built up over time (deposits of calcium carbonate which had slowly accumulated and solidified over plant debris in the river). There were two main falls, but views of both of these were obscured by the vegetation along the riverbanks. We could only get tantalizing glimpses of cascading water through the foliage, and weren't brave enough to venture right to the edge, where shady, still pools looked very likely to contain crocs. The water itself was a beautiful clear blue-green (due to the sunlight reflecting off dissolved crystals of calcium) and beckoned an impossible swim (sigh). It seemed the best way to truly appreciate the place would be via boat or canoe, but since we had neither, we eventually moved on.

After driving the last 80km to Katherine, our "plan B" of staying overnight in a motel there suddenly morphed into "plan C" when the lure of home and a proper bed only 3 more hours up the road became too much. We had already covered more than 600km by then, but we were both feeling pretty good, so we decided to push on home.

Around 150km further on "plan C" of cruising up the highway at 120km/hr, then became "plan D" - which consisted of crawling along at 60 as we drove into a cracker of a storm, and the torrential rain decreased the visibility to just 20m up the road. It was definitely slow-going, but still an adventure in itself (less-so for Ryan who was actually driving and couldn't even pull over because we couldn't make out what was on the side of the road).

As we finally made it through the curtain of water, it was just in time for the sunset, which filtered through the remaining misty rain to light the countryside pink-orange. As it set further, the last stormclouds glowed in spectacular colour - tried to capture the moment, but every photo was grossly inadequate compared to nature's display.