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.
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| '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.
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| Heather at a lookout above the entrance to the gorge |
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| A view of the gorge from our Sunrise Tour boat |
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| 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.
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| 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!
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| 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).
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).
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| 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.
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| 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.
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