Day 33 Katherine to Dundee Beach

Why Dundee Beach? We could get a site for a couple of nights, it sounded promising and it was relatively close to Darwin. Closer by boat than road though.

On the way here we passed touring cyclists on the road, sitting at home choosing a route probably seemed straight forward but the reality of the roads is anything but routine. There are enormous road trains, big 4WDs and caravans that often get a bit of a wiggle up especially when passing and on top of that most of the roads don’t have a nice safe, hard shoulder to ride on. Most of the roads have very rough edges and dodging around the broken parts puts cyclists even more at risk.

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Our first stop of the day was at Pine Creek where Alex enjoyed a Sausage Roll though he didn’t think it lived up to the last one he had at Mayse’s Cafe. The cafe has now been absorbed into the pub which is a shame. I would have liked to find out the connection between the cafe and the wife of the character remembered at “Bogger’s Park”. He had quite an employment record….miner, road builder, Pastoralist, Publican, professional boxer and wrestler! The manager of the cafe though was flat out while the Argentinian “help”, who’d only been there a week, flitted and chatted as she did her job.

Maybe the little statue of the miner is another tribute to Bogger.

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We made another wee stop at Adelaide River, it looks an interesting place and worth spending more time there in the future maybe but we had a place to be.

After turning off the main road to Darwin at Noonamah we continued north west about 60 kms to Dundee Beach. There seemed to be a lot of small “hobby farms” lining the road but all we could see were driveways, the bush was too thick to see anything more. Many were for sale.

Dundee Beach reminds me of Karumba with all the boats, caravan sites set up for a prolonged holiday and tonight even a Corella Cacophony. I saw how the experienced load their boats, they give the boat some welly and drive it up onto the trailer.

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I’ve seen a few different birds today- Butcher Bird, Kingfisher, Masked Lapwing and very differently coloured native Pigeons.

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Quote of the day: “I don’t care how many legs he has, it’s the beard I’m interested in!”

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