Litchfield National Park
Maggie and I somehow got the idea that Litchfield was a tropical jungle paradise, and it is tropical, but most of the park is brown dry savannah at the moment. Dotted through this landscape of termite mounds, rocks and stunted trees, however, are beautiful swimming holes.
We drove up the 4WD track from the Daly River end. The track is sandy and corrugated with a couple of creek crossings but nothing too bad - our clothes in the trailer stayed dry.The first campsite we came to at the south end of the park was Surprise Creek Falls .
At Surprise Creek Falls, the only place to be was at the swimming hole – the campground was sweltering and there were no other walks. It is a beautiful little swimming hole with lots of rainbow fish. I also managed to catch a small turtle underwater. The junping off rocks reached ridiculous new heights with Fabian and then me jumping off a rock way above the small middle plunge pool. Lucky it is very deep.
After a couple of days we headed off up the 4WD track towards the rest of Litchfield, managing to get temporarily stuck in the middle of the Reynolds River – ah-hah so that's why some wheel tracks went right!
We got out and the river promptly filled the footwells of the car. After a bit of poking around with a shovel, I just put the car into low range, reversed back and the drove forward over the big rock that was blocking the front wheel. Hmmm – I'll always follow the high route in future. We stopped for a swim in Sandy Creek falls, avoided the crowds of Wangi Falls, walked around another Lost City and finally camped at the 4WD campground at Florence Falls. We were now highly focused on finding shady camp sites. Florence Falls has a bigger, more beautiful swimming hole beneath the falls than the previous two falls but we spent more time in the creek beside the camp where Fabian (mainly) and Bro worked on the many small rock dams campers have built to deepen the small swimming holes in the creek.
Again the fish were abundant and beautiful. The boys threw lures after the sooty grunter in the evening, but I was the one who ended up catching the fish early next morning. At one stage every cast hooked a fish.The first two which I kept were the best.
After a day, we felt we had explored the area well and it was time to head for Darwin.
No comments:
Post a Comment