Sun 29 July 2012 - Victoria River Road House to Timber Creek

What an horrendous night!  It started well when we had a very sociable chat with a couple who were parked near to us.  However, once we were in bed & darkness fell, it was as though all hell had been let loose.  A group of bikers had arrived & they proceeded to behave like morons.  Not satisfied with being loud-mouthed & disruptive, they also began to let off very loud fireworks that seemed to burst above us & shower us with sparks.  There was a smell of smoke, which was scary, as we had a lot of dry grass all around us.  I was really frightened & became quite distressed as my imagination ran riot at the thought of what drunken bikers might do.  However, we have lived to tell the tale & are sorry that the experience has coloured our experience of the area which was, in fact, very beautiful.  The Victoria River cut its way through the landscape in a very dramatic way, carving a deep valley & forming fantastic escarpments.

We left the Road House at about 10.15am, still unable to make contact with Judy & Charlie.  We decided to head for Timber Creek, where we hoped to be able to use the telephone & the Internet again.

At Timber Creek, we secured a powered site & found that we had access to the Internet, but still no service on our telephone.  Having settled in, we went for a drive to explore the local area.

 The scenery was fantastic, as we drove to high spots & enjoyed panoramic views of the Victoria River & the surrounding countryside.

We went to look at Gregory's Tree, a huge boab that was marked, in 1856, to record the dates of Gregory's North Australian Expedition, when he set out to explore the region.  Boab trees are rather strange to look at, having huge trunks topped by fairly unimpressive upper branches (almost like a young child's drawing).  Some of the ones that we saw had pods on them & only very few had any foliage at all.  Previously, we have only ever seen them in South Africa & seem to remember that they can store huge amounts of water in their massive trunks.

Back at the camp site, we watched someone feeding crocodiles that appeared when meat was hung over the water from a small bridge.  There are certainly plenty of them about, so I won't be going for a swim in the river!