We’re sitting in the Daly Waters Pub at the moment. Daly Waters is on the lands of the Jingili people, who are the traditional owners of the land around here – south to Renner Springs and north to Newcastle Waters. We acknowledge their ownership of this land, and their elders past, present and emerging.
This is such a wonderful place! It’s really remote – but it feels like you’re down at your local. Plenty of cabins, plus a huge caravan park – and it is packed. Seriously packed.
We pulled in at about 4:30, and it was a good 10 minute wait just to get to the front of the bar to check in! We unpacked a little and then decided to go and sit in the pub to write in our diaries and just hang out until dinner – and it was a challenge to find a table even at 5pm! The atmosphere is just brilliant here – feels like a packed inner city pub, to be honest. People have started to get their meals around us, and the food looks brilliant. I’ve ordered their famous beef & barra – scotch fillet, plus a piece of NT barramundi. To say I’m excited is an understatement. There’s also been some brilliant live music here from Lou Bradley & Phil – some very fun country covers of songs, but great interaction with the crowd. After the kids went to bed I came back down to watch the end of the music with a final beer.
Today’s drive went really smoothly. We headed off from Darwin a bit before 8am, wanting to make some decent inroads before lunchtime. We pulled in briefly to Adelaide River, as they had a few little market stalls on the side of the road. The next stop was Katherine for a bit of extra petrol and some morning tea.
But the reason for wanting to make decent progress in the morning is that we were aiming for a second visit to the beautiful Bitter Springs in Mataranka! We managed to get there by about 1pm, and had a good hour or so floating down the spring together. It felt a bit quieter than when we were here about 10 days ago – but outside the weather was definitely hotter! After the floating was all done, we hopped out and dried off and made ourselves some lunch. But we didn’t hang around outside for too long – the aircon in the car was definitely a better option.
From there, it was only about 90 minutes down the road to here at Daly Waters.
The first 600km down – about 1000 more to go over the next two days!
