As if to confirm his eccentricity, John greeted us the next morning to announce he was off for his bush walk - he showed us his knapsack with the word “HIKING” stencilled on in permanent marker. Everything he needed, including water, a sandwich… (and I forget the rest). He assured us of his well-preparedness because he had not mistaken if for his fishing knapsack (which was presumably still in his van, and had the word "FISHING"on it). We bade him goodbye and reflected on our luck to have passed up the tourist delights of Daly Waters for an altogether more authentic, if slightly mad, experience at the Pink Panther in Larrimah.
We head north (oh, yeah, you knew that) for a much shorter day of driving. First stop Mataranka for fuel - fuel stops have to be planned given distance between and settlements, which is presumably how roadhouses grew up, to service vehicles travelling on transcontinental journeys through desert. With modern vehicles able to travel much further on a tank of fuel, they may eventually become redundant, but I hope they never disappear, as they represent a kind of outback life that is seen in few, if any, other places in the world.
So, although Mataranka is more than a roadhouse, its not by much - a couple of gas stations, a supermarket and a coffee shop, The Stockyard, serving OK coffee and 4 day old muffins! Mataranka is also the gateway to Bitter Springs, a wonderful so-called thermal springs, into which you can slide and allow the current to gently drift you downstream on a noodle (you’ve seen them in swimming pools at home - just not sure what they are called - think long thick sponge roller, basically a thick noodle). Only certain pools and streams are accessible as the rest have freshwater crocodiles in them - hope they have that right! The water itself is not a true thermal spring - its just that the groundwater here is 30C!
Later that day we reached Katherine, which had us feeling we were returning to more heavily populated Australia - it has a population of about 3000 I think and so felt like a metropolis compared to everywhere we had been since Alice. We chose our campsite badly and ended up parked on what felt like someones front drive! But we survived the night and prepared to head out in the morning to the... and it is here that I find my self easily lapsing into lazy European assumptions. I would, without thinking, call this a wilderness, but it is clear from all I have read here that the original owners, in fact now the current owners again, do not in anyway consider it a wildness. The Aboriginal people who have lived here for over 60,000 years consider this to be a kind of living embodiment of their culture. So I will too... (even if to my European heritage, it feels pretty remote!)