The Daly Waters Pub

Our plan was to continue along the Savannah Way to Roper Bar, but after about 10kms out of Borroloola, the roads deteriorated significantly. It looked like our grading streak had finished!! There had been no grading after the wet season and when we pulled up to a washout that was angled at 45 degrees, Sean called it. Had he not spent the previous afternoon putting the van back together, I think he might have pushed a bit further, but we back tracked and decided to travel back along the “highway” instead. The Carpentaria Highway was a sealed road, I’ll give it that, but calling it a highway is a stretch! It’s a straight, single lane, boring road that stretches on and on and on for hundreds of kilometres with nothing in between. Oh, except of course for the Heartbreak Hotel. We thought we’d stop for lunch, have a coffee & stretch our legs. We walked in, took one look and walked straight back out for vegemite sandwiches in the van. Enough said!

The next stop was Daly Waters, so on we pressed for another couple of hundred kilometres. I think we passed about 3 cars the whole day!

Daly Waters is a gem of a place. A quirky “stop over” place in the middle of nowhere with a historic pub, a camp ground that resembles a carpark and that’s about it. There are a couple of colourful locals, aka the resident drunks, but its pretty much a one night stop over for people travelling up from Alice Springs to Darwin. It had a pool, cold beer, decent looking pub meals and friendly staff so after travelling so many kilometres in such a short space of time, it was a little oasis for us.

Attached to the pub was a massive undercover beer garden, which made a perfect classroom for a few hours each day. Of course this made us magnets for the resident drunks who were only too happy to come over and share their life stories with the kids. Again, we’ll put that down to exposure to all walks of life. We’re a long way from Mona Vale now kids….

Daly Waters was also our first exposure to the wet season. It had been threatening to rain for a couple of days with nothing really eventuating, just hot humid days, so the pool was a life saver and a great bribe for getting on with school work.

We were also treated to live entertainment each night. The first night was an awesome couple of country singers, who were travelling on a John Butler scholarship. The next night was “Steve’s Still Rockin” which was hilariously worse than really bad karaoke. Steve was also one of the “helpers” who came over to talk/mumble/slur about himself during school time. Poor Steve has been the butt of many family jokes since. Perhaps it’s time Steve stopped rockin, at least in public anyway! It made for a very awkward cringing audience, other than the local drunks who thought he was fabulous! He was also flogging a special deal of 3 copies of his CD for $20, so before you laugh – this could be your Christmas present!