After our spare tyre adventures we stopped for some lunch along the river in Doomagee where we got to meet some of the local kids heading out for a swim. Apparently it was safe to swim along the causeway but not in the river. I don’t think I would be chancing it but when we drove past them on our way to Burketown they were all still in one piece.
Tim had discovered some camp spots along the Albert river that were run by the local council. The information on them was pretty vague but we went into the tourist info centre and soon had a little mud map and a campsite booked for the next 3 days. Driving out we crossed big open salt flats and soon found our campsite secluded along the river with our next neighbour about 800m away from us.
The river of course had crocodiles but we were up on a little raised bank and we parked up with a decent amount of distance between us and the river. This spot was exactly what we had envisioned when we pictured our secluded riverside camping.
It was so secluded that we didn’t even set up our shower tent for our nighttime showers. This was all well and good until a hot air balloon decided to slowly fly over the top of us just as we were about to shower. Luckily they dropped lower on the other side of us so we managed to shower without flashing anyone. Hilariously as we were sight seeing the next day we ran into a couple we had met in Roper Bar and they proceeded to tell us how wonderful their hot air balloon trip was the afternoon before. Tim and I had a little chuckle.
On that little town trip we stopped at the sights of Burketown. Which consisted of an Artesian bore sunk 723m into the ground that had been gushing hot water since 1897. It’s too toxic for humans to drink so was used for the cattle to drink and as a bath house until the 1960s. Now it just overflows into the surrounding area creating a mini wetlands. The mineral deposits that have built up around the spout have produced some wonderful colours. It was quite disconcerting when walking up to it as the ground all of a sudden got hot under foot. It reminded us a lot of the colours of Yellowstone in America.
The rest of the sights were a little anticlimactic after that one. We went and saw one of the dig trees from the explorer Landsborough on his trip to search for Burke and Wills. His adventures are pretty extraordinary though the dig tree not so much. We couldn’t find the engravings on the tree nor for that matter we were not even sure we had the actual tree. I have since looked it up and the tree was destroyed by fire and a new tree planted in its honour.
While in town we stopped at the local cafe and ate some delicious locally caught barramundi. But back at camp we were determined to catch a fish of our own and after lots of not catching Tim caught something! We didn’t know what it was so a quick photo and a call to my brother we identified it as a blue thread fin salmon. We didn’t know size limit so while on the phone Brendon looked for us and said 50cms. We measured and it was only 44cms so after an obligatory photo we threw it back in. For some reason I then looked it up and saw that it said 40cm as the limit. We quickly realised that Brendon still thought we were in the Northern Territory where the limit was 50cm. So we threw back a perfectly good sized fish! It’s definitely his shout next time we see him!
We extended our stay because we were enjoying ourselves so much and filled it with croc watching (didn’t see any) walking around the salt flats, not catching fishing and enjoying the views over the river. S