Friday 12 August 2011 Adelaide to Litchfield National Park 3000km flight 95km drive
We arrived at the airport at about 7am for our 8:40am flight
to Darwin to recommence our Holiday after an unexpected return to Adelaide.
Breakfast in the Qantas Club, a relaxing read of the morning
papers and then boarded our flight around 8:20. The flight was uneventful and we arrived in Darwin around midday. We were soon at the storage yard and collected the car and van (all undamaged, much to the delight of Deb) and set out for Batchelor and then Litchfield Tourist park on the fringe of the National Park.
The temperature up here was/is around 32C and the humidity
is fairly high, 90%. We arrived at the caravan park around 2:45. I smiled when I saw that the office, check-in and everything else about the CP was done at the bar, so very Territorian!! 🙂
It was a matter of just driving around and selecting whichever site we wanted, so after a lap of the park we decided on a site in
amongst some trees, a nice bit of shade.
Deb put together a very tasty cheese platter for lunch as I finished
setting up. As we finished lunch, she pointed to numerous clumps up in the branches of one of the trees over hanging the van, and asked what they were. I said either birds nests, or green ant nests.
I got up and had a close look at a particularly large one not too far
from the ground or our van, yep I was right, the biggest Green Ant nest I had seen for a long time!!! There are lots of green ants around but they don’t seem to be too much of a problem.
A large Black Cockatoo just flew in for a drink at a water pool near us, it seems to be alone and a bit edgy, so it won’t pose for a
picture. Maybe later. 🙂
Dinner tonight is at the Park restaurant, burgers with the
lot (I might have the buffalo 🙂 ) and then we will make plans for our day in Litchfield.
It is such a relief to be back on the holiday, but I think
it is going to take us a few days to get back into it properly. The last week knocked us both around a bit more than we thought it might, but it would have been much worse if we hadn’t gone back.
And so our holiday Part II has begun, bring it on. 🙂
Saturday 13 August 2011 Litchfield National Park
We were on our way into Litchfield National Park by about
8:30am. It was a beautiful warm blue sky sort of day, about 20C when we set out.
Before I start, I guess I had better let you know that Litchfield is no longer the forgotten park, hiding under the shadow of Kakadu.
It is very touristy and all the main attractions/sites here have
concrete paths, raised walkways, interpretive signs and people of the tourist kind (many internationals).
Our first stop was at a field of Magnetic Termite Mounds. The field looked out of place, a long stretch of grasslands in between low forest. But after reading the interpretive signs, it seems that they are on a flood plain, and so no trees grow there, and the termites feed exclusively on grass. There must have been hundreds of mounds averaging around 1.5m tall. Nearer to the road were some more conventional type termite mounds. A couple of them were over 5m high and very impressive; it’s amazing that they can get so tall when you consider how small the termites are.
We then went onto Florence Waterfalls and Buley Rockhole.
The falls were at the bottom of a gorge and there were 135 steps down the gorge wall to get to the bottom. The first thing that met us was the sound of people swimming and having a good time. This was a recurring theme for the day. If you want a quiet place to just sit and relax this isn’t it. 🙂 We made our way across the creek and the falls came into view. There were two falls coming down about a 10m drop. They both fell into a beautiful crystal clear
pool at the bottom. We took the Shady Creek walk back up to the top. A good alternative to retracing your steps. The path followed alongside a very peaceful little creek, with areas of cascades
and little rapids. We even saw some small fish swimming around in the creek.
We moved onto Buley Rockhole, a little upstream from Florence Falls. It is a series of about 4 rockpools formed by the creek as it swirls its way along down a rock bed. There were lots of people there, mainly young backpackers, jumping and diving into the pools and having a great time. Some even had masks and snorkels and were having a look to see what else might be hidden from view in the pools.
We the drove to the Tolmer Falls Lookout. These falls are almost veil like, and fall from at least 30m into an aqua green coloured pool at the bottom of a deep narrow gorge. Apparently the gorge and falls area is home to a colony of rare bats, but we didn’t see any.
A short drive up the road and we took the turn off to the
old Blyth Homestead ruins and Tjaynera Falls. This is a 4WD only road, so I was hoping it might not be as popular with the tourists as the easier to get to places. Our first stop was at the Blyth
Homestead ruins. It was a fun drive out there, a good variety of track, from sandy to gravel, and a couple of creek crossings. On the second crossing the car apparently wasn’t happy with my terrain setting selection, it was buzzing and beeping madly at me as we made the crossing, I was a bit fearful it might stop in the middle or something stupid like that. But all was good and we got through with no problems. I guess it didn’t like the fact that we went through on a sandy setting when it prefers the rocky setting
for water crossings . Dam smart car, but don’t you just hate being told off by your car!!!!
The homestead was really interesting. It was built circa 1900 and abandoned in the 1960’s, and looked like it had been restored to a point, that point being where it as safe to walk through (I think
:)). At the back of the homestead were the remains of an old tin mine. Hard rock tin mining, now that’s a novel concept! (most is alluvial), not surprisingly the mine went broke fairly quickly. The area in front of the mine is glittery with specks of mica, I presume the tin bearing rock had a lot of mica in it, or
is mica a high tin bearing mineral, my geology slips me. As we were leaving, 3 cars pulled up out here in the middle of nowhere. Two parked away from us and the other, a Discovery 4, parked behind us. The driver made a comment of something like,
“We may as well keep the Land Rovers together.”
We then drove to the car park for the Tjaynera Falls. There were so many cars there that we didn’t bother to stop. We enjoyed the drive back, taking in all the country side. We have both been a bit amazed at the lack of wildlife in the Park. Even birds are at a premium, it must be the heat?
Next was onto Wangi Falls, and with the kiosk there a promise of lunch. We arrived to another fairly full car park and found the
kiosk to be a smallish van parked in the car park (so we decided against lunch here). At the end of a very touristy setup of parks and concrete walkways we came to a large pond with lots of
people swimming in it and two waterfalls dropping into it. The one on the right was fairly substantial with lots of water cascading down from about 30m up, while the one on the left was a mere wispy ribbon of water. We took a walk around the side of the falls
into a real patch of rainforest. It was beautifully cool and had hundreds of bats roosting in the trees. The bats were pretty noisy with a call somewhere between a bird and a monkey.
After the last week we decided it was a good time to have a
relaxing afternoon doing not very much. So we headed back to the caravan park, had a bite to eat and just chilled for the afternoon. Dinner tonight at the park bar.
I am writing this outside under a tree next to our van, while Deb is sleeping. There are so many birds chirping away in the trees and
almost all of them I have never seen before.
Their colours and song are amazing and so relaxing.
It is so good to be back on this holiday and soon we just
might be back in full swing. 🙂
(Greg forgot to mention that I woke up quite grotty today,
couldn’t shake it until we went 4WD – the first creek crossing the water was up to the door, guess it gave me something other than myself to think about!! I have slept for over an hour this afternoon,
here is hoping that my better self is the one that wakes up tomorrow!!) – me too 🙂
