17th July

Well today has been full on. Full on nothing the most energetic thing we have done all day was walk up to the visitor centre to book ourselves on a 3pm gorge cruise.

Matt and Michael took some of the keen fisherkids to try and catch dinner while Paul took the rest of the kids to the pool - all mine went swimming. The fishermen returned with nothing so I guess it will be spaghetti Bol for dinner after all.

The gorge cruise was beautiful. Very relaxing going up the river in the afternoon sun with these amazing rock faces either side of us. We did the two hour cruise which did the first two gorges. You actually get out of the boat at the end of the first gorge and walk along the path through the rocks to get on a different boat to do the second gorge. As we were walking to the boat we passed a colony of bats. The photo below was just one tree of many and yes all those little black blobs are bats!

Let me mention here that I hate bats almost as much as I hate snakes an we have seen both here. The bats would number in the 10's of thousands. Luke woke me up going to the toilet this morning so I figured I would go with him - I took out my ear plugs (used to dull the symphony of snoring) only to be met with the sound of thousands of bats squawking at each other - so being the brave individual I am I decided there was no way I was going out there so I figured I would wait until the bats had gone back to bed before I ventured outside (yes I let the seven year old go out by himself)

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Other than the cruise the most productive thing we did today was book sites in Kunanurra for tomorrow night. We have to have powered sites so we can power up before heading onto the Gibb and I think we ended up getting the last three powered sites in Kunanurra. So we have to get the tyre fixed in Katherine tomorrow morning and then we have a big drive to cross into Western Australia.