Today we completed our tour of the north with a visit to Litchfield National Park, the smaller cousin to Kakadu. It is about 150 km from Darwin so can be visited as a reasonable day trip. Our first stop was the "magnetic" termite hills, so-named because the termites here build their hills as flat slabs which are aligned north-south. This is believed to result in comfortable temperatures inside the hill as the sun crosses the sky. Scientists have conducted tests and found that they do indeed use the magnetic field of the earth to determine north.
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| The area looks a bit like a large cemetery. All the hills are aligned to north. |
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| A specific family of termites builds this shape of termite hill. |
Our first stop was at Florence Falls where we hoped for a swim. We had read that some areas are still closed to swimming, but this one had opened. We took the steep way down from the car park to the pool via the steps, and later returned via the more gradual Shady Creek walking track.
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| The steps down to Florence Falls |
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| Florence Falls and pool, where there was quite a crowd of swimmers. |
We both took the plunge here, and the water was very nice. When I tried swimming over to the foot of the falls I found it was quite hard work against the current. The pool was full of fish, which didn't seem too disturbed by the swimmers. They appeared to be "sooty grunters" as far as we could tell.
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| The stream which flows out of the Florence Falls pool. |
On the same road we visited the Buley Rockholes, where we ate our peanut butter sandwiches beside the stream. The stream descends through a series of various sized pools, each forming a nice swimming hole.
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| Buley Rockholes - our lunch spot. |
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| Buley Rockholes were quite popular. |
One of the main stops in Litchfield park is Wangi Falls, but the pool there has has not opened yet following the end of the "wet" because they have not cleared it of crocodiles. It is a large deep pool fed by a couple of waterfalls. Wangi Falls is also the site of the only coffee we found for some distance.
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| Some geezers at Wangi Falls. |
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| Crocodile trap at Wangi Falls. |
