What time is it there?!

We can hardly say that we have have covered this park extensively, we had all of about 3 hours and 1 night here but the little bits we did see proved that it was a little gem. It is only a short drive from Darwin so it made a good base for our last night in the 'top end' (as it is fondly known) before heading back 'down south''.

The north definitely seems to be termite country, what we now don't know about termites is, frankly, not worth knowing! And believe us, we have seen several thousand mounds. Anyway, we decided to visit some called 'magnetic' termite mounds. For those of you not familiar with the life cycles, habits and species of termites (if there are any budding David Attenboroughs amongst you we want to know!), here is a bit of detail about this type. In order to keep their nests at a constant temperature and avoid them overheating, they build their nests on a North / South axis so that only a small surface area is exposed to the sun in the heat of the day. Apparently this is because they do not have any underground tunnels in which to keep cool in during the day which the other species have. So the overall effect is very thin but still very tall nests ....blah blah blah ... I am sure we are boring you now but we must explain why you can see none of this clearly in the pictures! As previously said, it is the wet season up here which means everything grows at a phenomenal pace, including the grass around the termite mounds ....basically, taller than the mounds themselves. So those little grey patches you can see amoungs the grass are the mounds but really don't seem very impressive - sorry! Some of the other 'Cathedral' termite mounds are massive and easily double the height of Nikky and over 50 years old. What we were never privvy to was the rough number of inhabitants in these huge mud castles. Answers on a postcard please ......

Florence Falls
We know that you saw alot of pictures of these when we were in North America but we have not been anywhere that had nearly enough water to create a waterfall for a couple of months, so this was a pleasant surprise. Just a little one burried somewhere in the rainforest which was very pretty.

Buley Rockhole
Gosh, if only we had longer ....... these pools were just a series of little streams gently cascading over rocks and forming small pools which are not big enough to be inhabited by crocs but just the right size for sitting in and cooling off in humidity! We had a little paddle and it was here that we had our first encounter with other tourists ....yuk! There were lots of people just lounging about on the rocks. We dreaded to think what it would be like here in the busy season, would ruin the whole idyllic nature of the place we suspect.

Dinner in a campsite restuarant
....... now how high would your expectations be? Ours were pretty low but we had exhausted our food stocks prior to our imminent plane journey and we were getting dangerously close to our mileage limitation on the hire car so aimlessly driving about the countryside trying to find something to eat was out of the question. So off we trotted with fairly low expectations. Well what can you say but gourmet ...... we had locally caught Barramundi with chips and salad and it was all beautiful and presented just as any top noshing establishment would! ....

More Litchfield pictures here.