Daly River & Litchfield National Park

Right from the outset I have to say that Litchfield National Park is probably the best National Park we have visited in all of our travels so far!

It has hiking trails to suit everyone, i.e.; short, long, steep, easy.  It has unique rock formations, it has hills, valleys, plateaus, & unique rock formations.  It has waterfalls both tall and small, clear water swimming holes, monsoon forest, savannah grassland scrub and, as always in the Northern Territory, termites mounds!

Litchfield National Park - What a great place!

We stayed for 4 days and had things to do each day without being hurried to get it all done or bored in between activities.  We thoroughly enjoyed every bit of our time here.  But before I go into detail, I need to briefly tell you about a couple of days we spent in the Daly River region prior to getting to Litchfield.

The Daly River Region is reputed to be one of the best ‘Barra’ fishing locations in Australia.  ’Barra’, short for ‘Barramundi’, is a fish species prized by anglers for their good fighting ability.  I haven’t got right into fishing to wile away the time just yet (truth be told - the rod and reel have not been seen for the entirety of our journey thus far), so despite its reputation for great fishing, that wasn't the reason we came here.

Parked on the low-level Daly River crossing looking for Crocs!
This crossing is frequently under water in the wet season.

We parked and set-up the van under a nice shady tree off to one side of the local pub.  I hear you saying, “I thought you said there would be no more bush pubs for a while”.  You are absolutely correct - I did say that!  For the first time in a long time we did not go somewhere in search of an autograph in our book.  The Daly River Inn is not even in our book but it is the epicentre of commercial and social activities (fuel, food & drinks, accommodation and information) in town.

The attractions for us, beyond ‘because it is there’, were reports of crocs in the river and water buffalo (yet another feral animal species in Australia), roaming the camp area under the cover of darkness.  As it was still early afternoon we decided to get out and about and explore the surrounding area a little bit.

From a lookout in the beer garden of the pub (we did go out and about beyond the pub), we quickly spotted a saltwater crocodile.  From a bridge crossing a few hundred metres away we soon spotted another along with a gangly looking Black Necked Stork wading in the shallows and walking on a sand bar in the river.  It was hard to get good clear photos of any of them as we were quite a long way from the animals.  With the camera on my phone at ‘full zoom’ the images I captured are a little blurry - definitely better seen with the naked eye than through a screen.  We also visited one of the local mango farms and picked up some mango cheeks for a smoothie - yum!

Saltwater Croc (estimated to be 2 - 2.5m in length)
lurking in the shadows

This Black Necked Stork has a funny way of 'sitting' down!

During the night, Heather heard some noise outside of the caravan.  Was it a herd of water buffalo?  She grabbed her video camera in the hope that it was and that she could get some footage of the beasts!  To our delight, the buffalo were out there!  Unfortunately, just the noise of the van door opening and a small light on the camcorder was enough to trigger their natural wariness resulting in them disappearing silently back into the shadows before we could enjoy their presence or get any photos.

Heather managed to get some video that was of much better quality than the stills I could manage.  To see video of the crocs, stork and the mango farm (but no buffalo), in and around Daly River, just click on the link below:

https://youtu.be/FOj__ZBSwJ4

Now... Litchfield National Park!

There are a couple of campgrounds in the national park.  We managed to get a site in the Florence Falls campground.  Just a 5 minute walk from our site were the namesake falls themselves.  Two cascades, side-by-side, splash down into a beautiful shaded waterhole.  The water was clear and inviting.  So much so that it did not take long for us to get into our swimming gear and take our first swim at the ’local’ waterhole.

Florence Falls from a lookout just steps from our campsite

View of Florence Falls from the steps into the plunge pool

Florence Falls from the cooling waters of the plunge pool

While termite mounds are prevalent all over the Top End, they are a major feature within this park.  There are two main types - Cathedral Termite Mounds and Magnetic Termite Mounds.  Cathedral Mounds up to 5 metres in height can be seen throughout the park.

Heather is dwarfed by this Cathedral Termite Mound

Magnetic Termite Mounds found on floodplains within the park stand up to 2 metres in height in a North-South orientation.  This orientation acts as a temperature control mechanism as it presents the least possible surface area to the heat of the sun.  We couldn’t get very close to them but there was a whole field of them.

Field of Magnetic Termite Mounds

Yet another feature of the park is ‘The Lost City’.  Located about 10 km down a 4WD access track, The Lost City is a formation of weathered sandstone blocks and pillars that, with some imagination, resemble crumbling buildings and ruins from an ancient civilization.

10km down a dirt track is an easy walk around and
through the sandstone pillars of 'The Lost City'

Over the next couple of days, we visited Tolmer Falls, Buley Rockhole, Tjaetaba Falls, Walker Creek and Cascades.  Spectacular scenery at all of them with swimming allowed everywhere except at Tjaetaba and Tolmer Falls.

So many photos, such limited space!
Did not want to bore you with endless photos of
waterfalls and swimming holes but I easily could have.

Last but not least was Wangi Falls.  Like Florence Falls, these are also double falls but Wangi Falls are much much higher!  Easily accessible, Wangi Falls is the most popular swimming location in the park.  Fortunately the pool at the foot of the falls is also large so there is room for everyone to enjoy themselves without feeling at all crowded.

Heather in front of one of the two cascades at Wangi Falls.
Shortly after this photo was taken we were swimming
where the falls splash into the waterhole!

WTF? - Where are The Farrows? had a great time at Litchfield National Park and highly recommend it to anyone who finds themselves in this part of the country.  Re-reading this post prior to publishing, I feel that I have not been able to do it full justice.  Hopefully, "Wow!" and  "You’ll Love It!" convey the message as to how much we liked the place.

A better way to see more of Litchfield NP as we saw it would be to watch the short movie (it runs for 9 min 30 sec), that Heather made of our time here.  To do that, just click on the link below to see what we saw.  Like we did, you may well find yourself asking WTF? - Where are The next Falls?

https://youtu.be/suyn_pTpnjs

With Darwin now less than 150 km away, WTF? - Where are The Farrows? are closing in on their targeted dry season destination.  Stay tuned for more tales from the Top End...

Katherine Gorges, Edith Falls, Douglas Springs & WTF Bakes Bread!

Hello folks!  Just a short post about our time at Nitmiluk National Park (formerly Katherine Gorge National Park) and a swimming opportunity relinquished.

The town of Katherine is about 100 kilometres up the highway from Mataranka and 300 kilometres south of Darwin.  Katherine is one of the main regional centres in the Northern Territory (4th largest population centre in the NT) and is also the home of the RAAF’s (Royal Australian Air Force) Tindal Base.  For us, the drawcard was to stay for a couple of days in the Nitmiluk National Park to enjoy the scenic beauty of Katherine Gorge and Edith Falls.

'Nitmiluk' means Cicada 

There are a number of ways to see the gorge.  It can be done from any or all of air, land & water.  For those with plenty of time and stamina, you can really get familiar with the gorge by taking a 5 day / 58km hike from one end to the other.  For those with very little time you can take a 30 minute helicopter flight over the gorges.  We chose to do a couple of short hikes to lookouts near our camp on the afternoon of our arrival and then booked a sunrise boat tour for the next morning that took us on a leisurely 2 hour cruise upstream to get within the walls of the first 2 of the 13 gorges in the system and up close to some aboriginal rock art.

Heather at a lookout above the entrance to the gorge

A view of the gorge from our Sunrise Tour boat

Aboriginal rock paintings on the walls of the gorge

Next on our Nitmiluk agenda was Edith Falls.  There are upper falls and lower falls - we hiked to and swam in both of them!  I took the GoPro camera with me to get some video and photos of us and the waterfalls from in the water but encountered some ‘low battery’ issues so I only had limited success.  Despite the low battery I did manage to get a couple of photos before the camera shutdown.

The water was lovely at the base of the falls!

Note to self:  Next time make sure the toys are fully charged before going swimming with them!

Having spent three days seeing the gorge and swimming in the refreshing waters of Edith Falls it was time to resume our nomadic ways and move on.  Next overnight stop was to be Douglas-Daly Hot Springs.  However, before we got there we had to make a short detour off of the highway along the way to visit the last of the Northern Territory Bush Pubs in our book - The Grove Hotel.

It was a dusty dirt track but fortunately there was only 16 kilometres to cover and it wasn’t long before we arrived only to find that it was CLOSED!  Not ‘We are Closed’ as in ‘We have not yet opened for business for the day’ but ‘We are Closed’ as in ‘We have gone out of business so you should just go away’!  So 'go away' we did!

No signature possible here!
At least we have a photo to prove that we visited.

At Douglas-Daly Hot Springs we quickly set-up camp and went to see what these hot springs were all about.  We soon learned that while plenty of people do bathe in the spring waters, you need to be very careful where you get into the water as it can be so hot in places that you can be scalded!  

As we walked downstream to find where the cooler entry point to the waters was we came across a croc trap baited with a pig’s head positioned… IN THE MIDDLE OF THE BATHING AREA! - a little disconcerting to say the least!  (Click on the image below to enlarge it to get a better look at the croc trap).

No problem respecting the Sacred Site but the scalding 
Hot Water, Quicksand & the Croc Trap was too much!

The combination of heavy penalties for setting foot onto a sacred site, potentially scalding waters, a baited croc trap in the only place the water was cool enough to swim, and, the presence of quicksand (that's a new one for me!), was enough to persuade us to give this particular swimming opportunity a miss!  WTF? - Where are The Farrows?, decided to enjoy some down-time at our campsite and bake some sun-dried tomato and olive bread/damper in the camp-oven instead.

Much nicer to eat fresh baked camp-oven bread than
be par-boiled in a hot-spring then eaten by a croc!

Next time around, WTF? - Where are The Farrows? venture deeper into croc country where we actually see a couple of Salties swimming in their river (they can have it!), and we hear tales of Water Buffalo roaming through the campsite at night.

Into the ‘Never Never’…

The further north we travelled the red dirt desert and low lying scrub bushland progressively transitioned towards ‘Savannah’ grassland with its short trees and tall grasses.  In amongst the grasses were ever more termite mounds that seem to establish themselves around, and eventually consume, these short trees.  As you continue to move north, the trees get bigger and so too do the termite mounds.

That is one BIG termite mound!

Do you remember that in a blog or two previous to this one that I stated there wouldn’t be much more blogging about Bush Pubs following the completion of our ‘Pub Crawl thru Queensland’?  Well, while I wasn’t lying to you, there are still over 20 of them for us to visit and for me to tell you about but they are spaced out quite a bit more than the 'one every day or two' that was the case while we were ‘on the crawl’.  It just so happens that we have already come across the first of those 20 or so pubs -  the Larrimah Hotel in the roadside town of Larrimah (where everybody knows your name because the population is just 10).  The Larrimah is famous for one thing and has recently become infamous, for another.

Why is it called the Pink Panther Pub? you ask...

The Larrimah Hotel is ‘famously known’ (perhaps that is a bit of a stretch), as ‘The Pink Panther Pub’ on account of it being painted pink and having many Pink Panthers located both inside and on the grounds outside of the pub.

Pink Panthers are everywhere
making this pub a bit of a Roadside Attraction!

It has also recently become somewhat ‘infamous’ due to the mysterious and unsolved disappearance of one of the towns 10 residents.  A local, and daily drinker at the pub, who, after finishing his ‘customary 8 - 10 beers’, left to go home with his dog on December 16, 2017, has not been seen since.

Police investigations have uncovered ‘bad blood’ existed amongst the residents but, as yet, no charges have been laid.  The ‘surviving’ locals acknowledge that there is a good chance that one of the 10 (or is that now 9?) residents in town is a killer living amongst them!  The Australian Broadcasting Corporation has even made an investigative TV report about it.  For anyone that may be interested in watching, just click on the link below that will take you to YouTube where you can watch the show.

https://youtu.be/9qcTjsXOJQc

After NOT going missing as we walked from the Pink Panther Pub in Larrimah to our caravan parked out the back of the pub, the following morning we made our escape from the ‘Larrimah Killer’ to our next stop in the Elsey National Park on the bank of the Roper River near the town of Mataranka.  Mataranka now markets itself as the ‘Capital of the Never Never’ - more on that later.

MATARANKA -  apital of the Never Never

The first thing we saw upon entering the National Park was a sign warning of the dangers of crocodiles!

Did we escape one killer just to move
straight into the territory of another?

Although Mataranka is well over 200 kilometres from the coast, the Roper River does drain into the ocean and as such, crocodiles can make their way this far inland so it is wise to be ‘Croc Wise’ as the sign suggests.  Which brings me to the next part of our story…

Mataranka is the location of the first natural ‘hot springs’ in the NT that we were to come across during our travels.  These springs are not only warm (about 34C all year round) but they are crystal clear and make for a very nice place to have a swim… if you dare!

The park rangers in the area assure everyone that there are no crocs in the springs but do ask that you ‘please report any sightings you my make’!

The waters were so inviting that we decided to ‘take a chance’ and take a dip.

Hey, there is nobody in there!
Where did everybody go all of a sudden?

Anyway, there were plenty of older folks already in the water and surely we could swim faster than them… (just joking - or am I?).

Elsey National Park is named after Elsey Station that was established in the area during the 1880’s.  An autobiographical book titled ‘We of the Never Never’, written by Jeanie Gunn, is an account of the authors experiences in 1902 living at Elsey Station as the Station Manager’s wife.  Despite being discouraged to ‘go out there’, she was the first white woman to settle in the area.  The book describes her and her husband's journey to the station and settling in.   The book was also made into a film in 1982 and was shot on the location of the former homestead.  We visited a replica of the house that was built for the film.

40C for 6 months of the year and brutal
wet season humidity for 3 of the other 6 months!
Why would you do it?

It would be tough country to live in even now and would have been brutal without any modern conveniences that we take for granted today, e.g.: electricity, refrigeration, communications, vehicles.  The manners and language of the day would have prevented it but I am sure that Jeanie Gunn may have muttered to herself WTF am I doing out here? just once or twice!

Back in the Northern Territory

We de-camped early from our campsite alongside a billabong (waterhole) located just 1 kilometre outside of the small town of Camooweal and hit the road.  As the driver I was happy that we were headed west which mean’t I didn’t have to squint into the early morning sun.  Just 13 kilometres later we reached a sign welcoming us to the Northern Territory.

Welcome to the NT!  It was nice to be back!

The Northern Territory (NT) of Australia is located in the central and central northern region of Australia.  It is bordered by Queensland to the east, Western Australia to the west and South Australia to the south.  Look to the north and all you can see is ocean.  If you jump in a boat and travel far enough you might run into Timor or Indonesia.

The NT is large and largely unpopulated...
but don't think you will have the place to yourself!

It is a big place at 1.42 million km2.  By way of comparison, the Northern Territory is over twice the land area of Texas (696,000 km2), and is larger than all of the Canadian provinces and territories with the exception of Nunavut (2.09 million km2) and Quebec (1.67 million km2).  On the other hand, when it comes to population it is pretty much empty with fewer than 250,000 people living there.  Of these folks, 145,000 live in the capital city of Darwin on the northern coast of the 'Top End'.  Darwin also happens to be our target destination for a couple of weeks in June.  The next couple of blogs will let you know a bit about what we encounter along the 2,000 or so kilometre route we take to get there.

As mentioned above, there is a whole lot of empty space in the NT.  Once we had stopped for a photo of the border sign it was another 250 kilometres until we came to the next sign of human life in the guise of the Barkly Roadhouse.  I thought about topping up the fuel tank but with the asking price for diesel being $2.00 per litre, I quietly muttered “WTF?!” to myself before WTF? - Where are The Farrows?, chose to drive right on by feeling quite happy with themselves having installed a long range fuel tank in the ute and knowing we would easily make it to a fuel stop with less gouging tendencies!

Another couple hundred kilometres down the road and we came to the intersection with the Stuart Highway.  The Stuart Highway is the main highway running N-S in the Northern Territory - it runs right up the middle from the SA border to Darwin.  Our Free Camps app was advising a camp known as ‘The Pebbles’ existed nearby and was just a few kilometres off of the Stuart Highway so we decided to make that home for the night.

We thought that because of the emptiness of the NT and all, and the fact that we were 6 km off of the highway down a dirt road, that we would have ‘The Pebbles’ to ourselves - a private campsite, if you will.  This was looking to be the case until a couple of hours before sunset when about 11 vehicles appeared within the space of an hour.  Oh well!  We chose to find the silver-lining associated with having to share with others and thus took a ‘Safety in Numbers’ point of view of the situation.  

Kunjarra or 'The Pebbles' campsite was located
near the base of some granite boulders.
When we arrived we had it to ourselves.
Same when we departed.
Overnight was a different story!

Following a quiet night our ‘private’ camp emptied out as rapidly as it had filled the previous evening.  WTF - Where are The Farrows? were first to arrive and last to leave!

In the next post, we follow the ribbon of sealed road known as the Stuart Highway northwards towards the ‘Top End’.  WTF? - Where are The Farrows? come across natural hot springs & waterfalls just begging us to take a dip (but are there any crocodiles in residence?).  The termite mounds we see appear to be getting ever larger and one of our Bush Pubs turns out to be part of an unsolved murder mystery!  Stay tuned for more tales from the Never Never...