The Reynolds River Track - a one day excursion from Darwin.

This time, Karen was going to Alice Springs for work. She loves her job, even with the silly political posturing that is a part of any job that involves industry bodies and political control. Yeah - you get nutbags and office psychopaths everywhere. Still, that is all just window dressing and it doesn't actually affect things on a day to day working basis and she can continue to enjoy her work, and she loves the travelling that goes with it. This time she was staying over for a couple of nights to see our daughter, Laura, who has recently relocated to Alice.

So I grabbed the opportunity to head off down the Reynolds River Track to see what it is like at the end of the dry season and packed the Patrol with all the gear I thought I might need

• Snatch straps (2) and rated shackles
• Long handled shovel
• Toilet shovel (just a small spade really)
• MaxTrax
• Radiator blind for those deep water crossings
• The usual spares kit (hoses, belts, repair bits etc)
• Swag, just in case I get caught out.
• Fridge - only holds my lunch and a few bits of canned food in case I get stuck
• Water - 4 litre "keg" and three 1 litre water bottles plus some tablets to clean up any river water I may need
• Second spare tyre? Nah - I'll leave that at home and just take the tyre repair kit

This is always a welcome sight, especially as we have had a few storm cells blow through recently - I was worried that the track may have been closed due to localised flooding or wet track.

Airing down at the start of the track.

I dropped pressures to 24psi to give me a bigger footprint and better corrugation absorbence - I was going to need that!

Bear in mind that this is a hot pressure so it will equate to about 20psi cold pressures.

Looks good eh?  Places to go and things to see, can life get any better than this?

Now this looked nice! A simple creek across the track with a firm bottom and not too deep but it promises something more exciting along the way, The water itself was crystal clear and flowing very gently with some beautiful trees along its path.

Corrugations - uncomfortable and noisy, but they keep some people out so that is a good thing. The Parks people try to make us keep the speed down and protect the track by placing erosion mounds across the track every little while. They are like speed bumps on steroids and stop you travelling fast enough to iron out the corrugations. Unless you actually WANT to take off every couple of hundred meters that is!

They also trap water behind them so you always end up with a big muddy puddle to drive through.

The storm cell also brought down some trees and branches - I tried to drive to the Blyth Homestead but the track was blocked by this small tree across it that I just couldn't pick up and move - half the roots were still in the ground.

Wish I had a winch! I suppose I could have unshipped the axe and gone to town on it, but it was just too hot to engage in any physical work that I didn't absolutely have to. The Blyth Homestead will have to wait for another trip some day.

Termite mounds are everywhere! This is a Cathedral mound and they are all over the place - if you look closely you will see more of them in the trees in the rear of the picture.

Further down the track, on the flat plains area, the dominant termite mounds are the magnetic mounds and at the bottom are those mounds that look like nothing more than giant dog turds. The change in soil type and the local vegetation dictates the changes.

Glad I'm driving a Nissan! :)  It was almost a surprise to find that this was the only wrecked vehicle along the track - you get so used to finding wrecks almost everywhere you go around here and they are almost always Toyotas.

Of course, Toyotas actually form around 90% of the vehicles you'd see on the tracks so perhaps that isn't a surprise.

I kept driving along, checking out the occasional bird or small 'roo, and generally enjoying the drive and the scenery. The recent rains have not really affected the track but they have made everything green and pretty.

What a shame it is so hot! This far away from the ocean's effect it has been between 38 and 40 degrees all day and the humidity at about 80 odd percent is oppressive.

I took the turnoff to Tjaynera Falls and parked up and prepared for a walk to the falls themselves. At about 3.5 klms return it is not a long walk, but the track is not as easy as some. On top of that is the fact that in the valley the temperature and humidity seemed to soar so when I headed off and the sweat was dripping off my finger tips I knew it was going to be tough.

Pictures are below:

This is the Falls and the plunge pool and I had the place all to myself. What a beautiful place to be. The photo doesn't show the size of it, but that plunge pool is about 75 metres across and filled with fish.

I went for a swim (I NEEDED to cool down) and after splashing around the place I retrieved my hat and just sat in the water and chilled out.

The water was in three distinct layers with the top four inches being warmer than blood temperature, the next foot or so being warm and then below that was cool. It wasn't cold, just very, very pleasantly cool.

Sitting there I ended up being investigated by lots of fish including some decent sized sooty grunters.

Magic.

So, what does this display of clothes drying on a rock suggest to you?

Yep - they were sweat laden and needed drying while I went skinny dipping!

The last art of the track looked like this - all rocky and difficult to find firm footing,

Some of the track was just sandy like this.

And other parts needed you to be part mountain goat.

All in all, it was a beautiful lace and well worth shedding a couple of kilos of sweat to get there!

From that point on I drove through some grassy plains with the unusual magnetic termite mounds.

Edge on - you can see how thin they are. This example was about 8 or 9 feet tall.

This is the same mound from the side with the car door showing to give it some perspective.

As you can see, there are lots of them around and just look at how green that grass is!

Now, the really interesting part of this trip was the river crossing and I had a ball going through them.

The first crossing (the West one but I always think of it as the Northern one) I completely forgot to photograph because half way across I came across the first of only three vehicles that I saw on the track - yep - right in the middle of the river.

From the northern bank you drop into the river and drive downstream for about 40 metres before negotiating an island (about 40 square metres but it has lots of trees) and driving up onto a sand bank. That part of the crossing is made a little longer by the Parks people having roped off two thirds of the river to keep people out of a big hole and push them round the shallower part. The second part of the crossing is just to drive across to the far bank. Anyway, it was at this section that I met the car coming the other way resulting in some reversing up onto the sand bank and then a chat with the other driver.

Anyway, no photos I'm afraid, not even of the water washing up the bonnet!  Well, over the numberplate anyway. :)  Yeah - it was disappointingly shallow with the depth markers indicating that it was around 400mm deep for most of the river. Still, it is always exciting driving along a creek, especially when you see the croc warning signs at the entrance to it - will I see one or won't I? The answer is no, I didn't see one.

The second crossing (see below) was not even worth mentioning.

Yeah - disappointing isn't it?

So I trundled on, just checking things out until I got to the turn off for Surprise Creek falls where there was a Nissan Pathfinder parked in the parking area.

The walk to the falls was a short one, although very sandy, and I got to the falls after about five minutes where I found a family of four people enjoying the water.

This plunge pool is not only more open than Tjaynera, it is also the beneficiary of a much more gentle slope of the ground so it is much safer for kids - there really is a shallow end unlike Tjaynera where the water drops off into the VERY deep within a metre or so.

Anyway, I didn't think the family would appreciate me stripping off and joining them so I left them to their swim and headed off again.

From that point on the drive was easy with some water holes before heading off to the Adelaide River pub for a couple of cleansing ales and a welcome burger before going home.

Reynolds River Track? A pleasant day trip out of Darwin, but it isn't the dramatic challenge that some accounts make it to be. Of course, on another day and with more water around it would be, so perhaps I can get back here then.

Thanks for reading this.

Garig Gunak Barlu - The Cobourg Peninsula

Karen was heading off to Melbourne for a conference so I had a few days spare and decided to head out to the Cobourg Peninsula to see what the place was like. I had heard so many good reports about it that it had been on the To Do list for some time.

Permits were organised and ended up costing $232.10 for a vehicle. This included the permit to transit through Arnhem Land although I wasn't allowed to stop there.

The NP people tell me that they do all the work of looking after the park but the traditional owners get 100% of the revenue from the permits.

I may be out of order here, but charging that much to visit a NATIONAL PARK seems pretty usurious to me. I thought that Nat Parks were resources for all Australians and should be available at some reasonable cost.

It is also interesting to note that revenues earned from any resource (whether from NP fees or mining royalties etc) are not considered as income if you identify as aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander and therefore are neither taxed nor affect the level of payment you get from CentreLink.

Yes, that is true, and where mining royalties can easily run into six figures (seven figures in a couple of cases) it doesn't seem even handed does it?

Whinge over.

I left home early and headed off to Kakadu. Cahill's Crossing (near Oenpelli) is the main route into Arnhem Land from this side and as it is tidal you need to make sure you don't want to cross within a couple of hours either side of high tide which is 5.5 hours after tide times at Darwin.

I filled up with fuel at Jabiru and headed for the Crossing.

It's nice to see signs like this isn't it?

The adventure begins.

On the road through to Oenpelli (and Ubirr etc) you need to cross the bridge over Magela Creek. This creek floods in the wet season and leave the normal flood wrack in the trees. As this year's wet was almost non-existent the flood levels were very low indeed and the evidence is in the trees there.

Cahill's Crossing. It is really not a drama for such a well known dangerous crossing. It is only dangerous if you try to do it around high tide. These days the rocks on the north side of the crossing will catch most vehicles if they get swept off the crossing, but you wouldn't want to rely on it would you?

Kakadu has large numbers of brumbies wandering around and all look fat and healthy like this one. The greenies want to remove them (and anything else that wasn't part of the environment back in 1770 including 4WDers), but the TOs are fond of them and won't allow it.

Paddocks like the one above are interspersed with wet land stretches and rock outcrops to form a beautiful and dramatic landscape that really makes you want to stop and breathe the air there and maybe take a few photos. Sadly the permit forbids us to do that.

The road continues beyond the beautiful spots around Oenpelli and the landscape turns into the typical northern Australian bush. Rather flat and feeling like it may be endless. The road itself becomes a corrugated exercise in tyre pressure adjustment, but every now and then you come across a feature that slows you down from the usual 85kph cruise. Sometimes it is a water crossing like the one above, but more often it is a washout or a bulldust hole - you REALLY need to keep your eyes open on this road to stay safe.

The corrugations ranged from the irritating (smoothed out once you get over 80kph) to the downright horrendous causing the Patrol to bang and shudder and rattle.

I said Phooey to the permit regulations and stopped at one point to get a cold water out of the fridge. Yes, it was water! and rest for a few minutes. The total concentration of driving this road takes its toll you know!

Anyway, this was a straight and relatively smooth section, but you can still make out the irritating corrugations.

Spot the dingo!

Wildlife was prolific on this trip, even during the day and I lost count of the number of dingoes I saw. I am pretty sure there won't be too many cats around here!

As you'd expect at this time of year, there were lots of fires burning, reducing the fuel load.

After a couple of hundred klms of rough road I eventually reached the Nat Park, but I still had 70 or 80 klms to travel to get to the camp sites.

Still, the trip had been done in perfect conditions (aside from the road) and I was feeling good. This was especially true as I hadn't seen another vehicle or human being since I left the Crossing.

I checked in with the ranger station and picked up some advice and info - really helpful people there - and drove off to the camp site. There are two sites, one that allows gennies and one that forbids them. As the individual sites in each case are close to a soccer pitch apart from each other and are screened by trees and shrubs I don't imagine the gennie site would have been noisy anyway, but I still chose the non-gennie site.

As you will see from the photos above, each site is pretty spectacularly set up with a shade, a nice picnic bench/table and a fireplace. The rangers told me to collect firewood from within the park (now THAT is something I have never come across before) as they didn't want to import any wood-borne pathogens into the park. There is, as he said, literally tons of firewood everywhere anyway.

Each site is also given a bin with a snug fitting lid and this bin is emptied every day by the rangers. Recycling bins for glass and aluminium cans are sited at the toilets.

In brief, the campsite was just perfect and every consideration has been made to your comfort. Just fantastic.

Regarding campers comfort, the toilets and showers are worth a mention. They are cleaned on a daily basis and are as nice to use as you could ever expect. No smells or spiders or litter or anything.

Also, if you have a look at the shower you will see two taps. That is because they provide (solar heated) hot water in the showers. Yes, HOT water. Just brilliant.

Across from the camp sites is the beach. This beach extends the whole way around the peninsula and is untouched. Of course, you can't go swimming here, but it does make for a beautiful scene.

This sign is no joke. To the right of the picture is the beach and to the left is a wetland area and crocs do cross the track here all the time. A couple of days later I stopped here to check out why someone else had stopped and they were looking at the foot prints and tail/belly drag marks of a huge croc. I can only relatively recently have crossed too as there were no tyre marks over them. These guys drove on before I could get my camera and destroyed the tracks, but believe me, they were impressive.

There are a couple of tracks to drive around this art of the park and the most scenic is the coastal drive which had me stopping every few minutes to gaze open-mouthed at the scenery. I was all alone out there and I loved it.

I also pulled out a rod with a few lures and flicked it around with no success.

At times the track cut slightly inland through tall grass paddocks and varied the scenery, but it was all good stuff.

After about 25 klms the track turned inland and became a fair bit more overgrown and rutted, but driving through the trees gave me an opportunity to see more dingoes and a couple of the Banteng cattle that run wild there.

The track eventually pops out on the main road back to the campsite. I had spent most of the day driving the track and walking on the beach so I headed back to cook dinner.

The next day I took a rutted track down to Caiman Creek to do some fishing. The photo above shows the steepest part of the track. Strange how photos make even the steepest and most washed out track look easy isn't it? Not that this was hard (at least in the dry) but it was the only place that I actually slipped the Patrol into low range.

The fishing was slow though. It must have been the wrong time of day or tide or barometric pressure or the lures were wrong or . . . . . . . . . .

I did hook two fish though. The first one I never saw and apart from a few slowish head shakes all it did was swim away unstoppably until the line broke. The second was (I think) a blue salmon that jumped and tail walked and thrashed about until it spat the lure.

Sigh - I will have to defrost a steak for dinner tonight then.

Caiman Creek hits the ocean here (see the photo above) and doesn't it look just gorgeous?

Across the water from the camp sites is the old Port Essington and the ruins of the Victoria Settlement. There is no road access so I couldn't get there, but at Smith Point the settlers built a beacon to warn ships away from the rocks and shoals just off the coast. The structure above is a memorial to them.

All too soon I had to head home to pick up Karen from the airport and to settle back into Darwin civilisation (which is a bit different to everywhere else).

The park had been spectacular and I would definitely head back there again - just beautiful - but the near 300 klms of corrugations back to Cahill's Crossing had to be re-conquered so off I headed.

The Crossing had one last surprise though - it was blocked by a tree trunk that had floated down the rived and settled across the causeway. We (me and half a dozen other vehicles) settled down to wait for the police to arrive.

The police eventually got there and commandeered a tourist truck/bus and drove out to the log. Two cops got out and tied a strap around the log and connected it to the front of the bus. There was a third cop armed with a rifle who sat in the bus and kept a lookout for crocs.

The bus slowly reversed back (fortunately it wasn't a Toyota bus as we all know about Toyotas and putting stress on their front diffs by reversing) dragging the log until it lay lengthways along the rock wall.

Yay!  Let's hear it for the police!

So, Garig Nat Park - a great place. I am glad I went.

Litchfield

After discovering that the Patrol had some water in its diesel (probably just the condensation from the humid atmosphere here) I chucked in a bottle of some magic "stuff" from the servo that is supposed to absorb water and treat an algae as well as magically cleaning the injectors.

We then decided to take the Troll down to Litchfield to burn through some fuel and hopefully clear out any rubbish and water etc.

So off we went on Sunday morning with a picnic packed and our walking boots in the back.

The first stop was the Buley Rockholes.

As you can see, there was still a fair old flow down the steps, but people were still swimming there and having fun.

The girls in the photo above have found themselves a quiet eddy in which to relax.

Next stop was Florence Falls which were booming nicely,

The mad swimmers, who were also climbing up the rock face and jumping back into the water, were of course AJs.

We took the walk down the steps to the valley floor and wandered up to the pool itself.

Looks lovely doesn't it?

The day was very hot though so we abandoned out plans to hike around and we settled for a quiet picnic and a relax before heading home again,.

The Troll was running noticeably smoother after that little run so hopefully we have cleared things.

UK trip - Helen and Marks wedding

Karen's nephew Mark invited to his wedding over in the UK and as we hadn't been away from Darwin for months we decided to go.

The flight over was easy enough as we left Darwin and flew to Singapore and stayed there for 24 hours for a bit of a rest and a look around the city.

I have to say that we simply love Singapore. Everything there is done so efficiently and with such politeness it makes the rest of the world look rude in comparison.

Aside from checking out the shops (and how many specialist designer shops does one city need?) we went for a ride on the Singapore Flyer - currently the largest ferris wheel in the world.

It was an amazing thing to do and the views (we were blessed with a beautiful, clear day) were astounding.

 The picture above shows the pods as they come into the base and this is where you hop in.

One the way up! Singapore is an apartment city and these apartments look to be some of the nicest.

Difficult to see easily, but this building has a boat perched on top of it!

A view from the top - Cool eh?

We left Singapore on a Qatar Airways flight, stopping over in Doha for an hour. Great service, great planes, but the Doha stop is one that would make us think twice about flying with them again.

Perhaps once they have built the new terminal and you don't have to suffer with the bus transfers.

England - well predictably, this was not as warm and pleasant as Singapore (nor home in Darwin) so we ended up rugging up and trying to avoid the wind.

We drove to Crewe to see Karen's sister in law, Glynis, and then a couple of days later we drove over the Peak District to my old home town of Chesterfield.

Yes - it was snowing! As you can see, it can be really pretty when it is snowing, but it is definitely survival unfriendly.

Speed limits officer? What speed limits?

The little Vauxhall we rented. At ten pounds a day ($16 Aussie) it was a great little runaround.

The view from my brother's place.

Us with my brother outside a local pub. Yes, it IS snowing.

Snow is not a bad surface to drive on as it has some grip and is predictable. It gets worse when the road surface underneath is covered in ice though.

Chesterfield is an old town - it has its origins as an early Saxon settlement before the Romans took over and made it a Roman town. The earliest architecture left in the town is medieval though.

Anyway, the pump above is the old medieval town pump and is situated in the middle of the market. It has been dressed up a little, but it (apparently) still works and forms the centre of the town.

There is an old area just off the market place called "The Shambles" which also dates back over a thousand years. The pub in this photo is in the middle of The Shambles and, according to the plaque on the wall, was used as a recruiting post for the Knights Templar when they were looking for volunteers to go and fight in the crusades.

I grew up with this stuff and thought nothing of it, but now I am appreciating it a little more.

We returned to Crewe for the wedding and to buy me a new suit.

We did the shopping around the town and then went to Nantwich (where we found a suit that we liked) and enjoyed a couple of beers there.

Nantwich is an old town too and the pics above show some of the buildings that date back 500 odd years. Nice town,

The new suit - I don't really like the modern style of having things look too small, but what the heck.

Karen's outfit - she loved it in the shop and hated it when she got it out for the wedding. I liked it though!

One of a million wedding photos!

After the wedding we drove south to see friends on the south coast. I really dislike the UK motorways these days. The lanes are narrow and crowded and the people seem to drive so very fast and so close together. I can cope with the speed, but the fact that someone is only a couple of metres away from my rear bumper at 140kph is quite disturbing.

So I decided to take the more scenic route through the Cotswolds and around Oxford and these photos were taken on that trip.

Yes, it was snowing.

We stopped for a bowl of soup at a cafe and some cheeky devil parked his Aston Martin DB9 next to our powerhouse Vauxhall!

We reached Milford on Sea and settled into our B&B before catching up with Carolyn and Bruce.
Carolyn had donated a kidney to Bruce (what a generous and heroic thing to do!) a couple of weeks before we got there so they were both less than lively but it was great to catch up with them.

While we were there we took a walk along the cliff edge to Barton on Sea to get a bit of exercise.

These little huts are bathing huts and each is owned by a person and they use them to store their beach things. Given that the beach is made of pebbles measured in inches across this probably includes some substantial boots.

We left Milford on Sea and headed off to Sway in the New Forest. This is close by so we detoured to Bournemouth to check it out. We walked the pier and nearly froze solid - Cold just doesn't do it justice.

We ran away from freezing Bournemouth and headed to Sway, but we called into a local pub there before we got to Sway. Magic - pubs are one thing that the UK does really well.

While we were staying with Judith and Paul in Sway we had some other mutual friends, Jayne and Bob, come along as well. I have to say that this couple of days was the best fun we have had in ages. We had forgotten just how much we loved these people.

Everyone took the day off work for our visit and we pent that day chatting. At lunchtime we went for a walk through the New Forest to a pub for lunch and it was just a magic time.

New Forest ponies - more of a road hazard than roos over here!

Look! It isn't snowing!

The obligatory silly photo. The track we walked was often under water so we all got muddy and wet, but somehow that didn't matter!

I will leave the story there for now, but to summarise things, we had a great time catching up with people and even if the weather was typical British winter stuff, it didn't dampen the joys of the trip.