Sun 18 Aug 2013 – Litchfield Gorges and Plunge Pools Part 1

Brian ,who owns Pandanus, advised us to go as far as we could into the Park and then work backwards, in order to avoid the crowds of people bused in from Darwin. As we'd already seen the buses whizzing past while we had our morning swim, we could see this was good advice.

On the way we stopped to view the termite mounds - while some were huge like this cathedral one 

others were magnetic - that is the termites here orientate their mounds to a magnetic north/south orientation (and to prove this experiments have been conducted to alter the magnetic field around the mound and the worker termites re-orient their mound.

Wangi Falls was our second stop but, even though we beat the buses, there were still lots of people there. It's a huge pool so there was plenty of room for everyone.

Our next stop was Cascades and we went to the lower pool. The last part of the walk was a lot of rock hopping and Mel's knee didn't like it one bit.

We had planned to stay the night at Walker Creek, but when we got there we discovered it really was for walkers- you had to carry all your gear some distance into the bush to camp!

We wandered back and, on the way, saw a Christian residential high school for Aboriginal children. We also found a private camping place and stopped to make enquiries. An Aboriginal man came out to talk to us, followed by a pig. He said we could stay there for $5 each, but as we talked the pig came up and bit Rodger's foot and then headed Mel’s way! You won't be surprised to hear that we politely declined this offer and headed back to Wangi to camp. Nearly everybody had left now so we had a lovely evening swim with a massage sitting in the waterfall.