Katherine to Pine Creek
The road out of Katherine, travelling north is quite undulating, and the vegetation at the side of the road now is much thicker – Peter’s words ‘very beautiful tropical scenery’.
Also part of the scenery are the many large termite (dirt) mounds, some are over two metres high. Twenty kms north of Katherine is a Campus of the Charles Darwin University, Peter decided to take a short detour off the road to take a look.
I asked if having nine kilograms less luggage on the bike made much difference, and Peter said mentally, definitely. But today was a very still day, so it wasn’t that noticeable, any side winds would have had a big impact.
The temperature was 32C by lunch time, and it had dropped down to a balmy tropical evening of 22C by 6pm. Tonight’s accommodation is a motel room for $98 per single.
Peter said last night he was feeling so excited that he barely slept.
I said, ‘Tonight you had better get your $98 worth’.
From here to Darwin, Peter is on a ‘new’ piece of road. When we did our planning trip in April, we did the detour out to Kakadu National Park which is on a different highway, before we joined back onto the Stuart Highway.
He is excited to be seeing some country for the first time.
Good News!
On Thursday 6th August I wrote about a cyclist being sucked under the road train.
I assumed such an horrific accident would have killed the cyclist.
But today when I was talking to Dick (an avid reader of this site, because he also recently cycled from Adelaide to Darwin, raising money for the sinking of wells for drinking water for schools in Afghanistan) he informed me that he had done some research, reading through the back copies of the ‘Northern Territory Times’.
The cyclist was a young Tasmanian woman who was just setting off from Darwin to ride around Australia. About 25kms into her adventure, her bike was sucked under the road train, but amazingly she managed to jump out of the way. While certainly injured, she was not killed. I was so thrilled to hear this news from Dick, I thought I’d share it with everyone. Apparently the headlines that Peter read were at least 10 days old. I guess nothing much else had happened since.
