Kms today 116 Kms to date 6257
We had a leisurely breakfast at the Motel as quid pro quo for charging the Hyundai over night. We also booked a tour of the Cutta Cutta caves, which I noticed on the road from Mataranka to Katherine.
Morag had some shopping to do for Crocs, eye drops and a car emergency starter battery just in case the flat battery problem returns. We had some lunch and headed south to visit the Cutta Cutta caves. These are limestone caves formed 500 million years ago in the Devonian Reef. They are purely of geological and natural history interest as the local aborigines were not interested in the dark spooky caves. We had a guided tour for just the two of us and very interesting it was too. The caves are home to some special bats that thrive in the warm humid atmosphere and it was a warm 32 Degrees. We saw lots of stalactites and stalagmites and an unusual crystallisation of some features due to the very slow water ingress rate and humid atmosphere. We saw a cave snake - a small black and white one in a crevice in the tunnel wall.
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| Unusual crystalline formations in the Cutta Cutta caves. |
After the tour we headed for Mataranka Homestead, a place I had visited few times before. We had a Motel unit but it was very unimpressive with a toilet that was incapable of flushing away it's contents. We were reduced to pouring water out of the kettle to get the job done. On the other hand there was a large flock of peacocks which kept us entertained.
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| The Peacocks and Peahens made a great noise on our roof |
We had dinner with the hordes of campers at the homestead and went to bed early, only to be kept awake by a performer who cracked whips in time to various songs and spoke in a loud voice to the audience. Whip cracking was a popular sport and a kid was cracking his whip close to our unit and getting very irritating. It reminded me of the kid in Hyderabad who kept me awake letting of fireworks when India beat Pakistan in the Cricket World Cup in 1996.
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