The travellers have been finding out about the original people of Australia in Kakadu National Park.

After leaving Kakadu we headed back to the highway and turned south, back through Katherine again and made it as far as Mataranka where we stopped for the night. There are some lovely thermal hot pools here and we took the opportunity to have a relaxing dip. There were also thousands of flying foxes, or fruit bats as they are also known, which are the largest of all the bat family. They roost in the trees and fly off to feed at dusk and are an amazing site to see when they swarm off together.

Next stop was at what I can only describe as a totally unique place, famous among the grey nomad community, the Daly Waters Pub. It has become a bit of an institution among the grey nomads and stands on its own, in the middle of nowhere, near the junction of the Stuart Highway and the Carpenteria Highway. It has a caravan park for people to stop overnight and it is always packed out. The food is typical outback bbq, huge steaks with all the trimmings and there is always entertainment, usually a comedian and a singer. The atmosphere is very rowdy but huge fun.

Next morning we set off again, still travelling south, and got as far as Banka Banka cattle station. This was a real eye opener for us. It is a working cattle station and has installed facilities for people to be able to stop over. That evening there was a campfire and most people sat around it and one of the station’s staff gave us a talk on the workings of the station. It exists to raise cattle and covers 350,000 acres, that’s almost 550 square miles, which is a pretty big farm! Transporting the cattle is done using road trains which I’m sure you will all have heard of. They are enormous, usually with three trailers which can be up to 55 metres long. I can’t now remember how many cattle would be aboard a typical road train but I do remember that even back then, eighteen years ago, the value of each consignment was well in excess of a quarter of a million dollars.

Road trains in general are widely used all over outback Australia. When you are travelling there you need to know the special protocol for driving when encountering one. Basically there’s one rule, get the heck out of their way! Pull off the road and let it pass, they are too big to argue with and they won’t move over for you. We once almost got wiped out by a road train that was hauling iron ore. We were towing our caravan and were approaching a bend in the road and suddenly this monster appeared coming towards us round the bend and I had nowhere to go as there was a very big ditch to my side of the road. He was really travelling at high speed and as he drew level with us the last of its trailers, the third one, suddenly flipped and was now coming at us sideways on. I really thought our time was up but it passed us by, missing us by millimetres. The drivers are very skilful and people told me later that the driver of this one probably did it deliberately because he considered we had not got out of his way.