6/12/08 On our way at last! We stopped at the little township of Batchelor before we entered Litchfield, for fuel and drinks; it was a very green and agreeable place, the houses set very far apart from each other, and the 'town centre' consisted of a roadhouse/petrol station, a pub, a little tourist information centre (where we picked up a lot of leaflets about Litchfield and elsewhere in the Northern Territory), and some public toilets. After this, we carried on into the park itself. The first thing we noticed was many of the trees had the top third of its trunk completely stripped of all bark; they looked quite striking, with the bottom two thirds dark and then the top third white. I found out the next day that these trees are called 'Darwin Woolybutt' trees! - no joke. Apparently the bark on the bottom bit of the tree is naturally fire resistant. A lot of the other trees were scorched near the bottom, though still fully in leaf at the top, and there were some stumps which were just charcoal. In fact, a couple of times we passed places where there was still smoke coming up, and a couple of flames.

In part of the Park, there were earthy orange termite mounds mixed in among the trees, and we stopped at a place where there are lots of 'magnetic' termite mounds - not magnetic in the sense that our car keys would stick to it, but in the sense that they were built in a deliberate north-south alignment so that the heat would be regulated. We couldn't go right up to them, but they looked very vertically flat. Nearby, there were some of the orange more 'normal' termite mounds, and you could get up close to these. Unlike the ones we'd seen from the car, they were very tall.

We set up camp at Buley's Rockhole, a descending series of little waterfalls and pools which you can swim in. At this point, Dave saw a kangaroo, but it went before I got to see it. Then I turned round and saw one much closer, standing upright and looking at us! We managed to get a few photos of it. When it eventually bounded away, a joey followed behind. The first thing we did after setting the tent up was go for a swim. The water was cool and very clear, and quite deep in places. A distinctive feature of Buley's Rockhole is that it contains circular pools that have been formed over thousands of years by the current forming little whirlpools, driving rocks round inside and thus eroding the edges to form the circular pools. We didn't notice any whirlpools while we were there, however. After this it was starting to get dark, so we just cooked dinner and got an early night.

7/12/08 We couldn't get to some of the sights because of the tracks being for 4WD only and closed off for the wet season into the bargain, but we still managed to visit the main places! The first place we stopped at, after a quick swim in Buley's Rockhole when we first got up, was the Tabletop Swamp. Although currently dried up until the Wet begins in earnest, it was still an interesting sight. The first thing we saw was a white cockatoo in a tree, and then we walked for a minute until we reached the swamp. It was covered in tall grass, and was surrounded by hundreds of white paperbark trees. The name is very appropiate, because the bark was extremely papery and hung off the trunks in great long strips.The next place we stopped at was Tolmer Falls. This was a spectacular waterfall, falling into a pool which lay far below us at our lookout. People aren't allowed down there because of colonies of the extremely rare Orange Horseshoe and Ghost bats which live in caves there.

After this we carried on to Wangi Falls, and swam for some time in the large plunge pool there. We swam all the way across it untill we reached the actual rocks the water cascaded from. There was a small but deep rockpool nicely placed just a bit up from the pool itself, right next to one of the waterfalls, so we lay in that for a while before getting back into the main pool. We swam over to the main waterfall, and stood up underneath the water - it was extremely powerful, as you'd expect. As we swam around, it started drizzling. Then it began absolutely pouring, so we just stayed in the pool until it had finished. The shower was as extreme as the one we had been caught up in on the jungle track in Koh Tao. We stood in the pool up to our necks until the rain had reduced to a drizzle again, and made a dash for the car, having put black binbags on the seats.

Luckily, the rain stopped soon after we arrived back at the tent. When we got out to deal with the clothes we'd left out that morning and had got soaked, a blue-winged kookaburra suddenly plopped down a couple of metres in front of us! It looked like it had just dropped like a stone from the tree above. It wasn't afraid of us, and hung around for quite a while, so we managed to get some pictures of it before it finally flew away again.

8/12/08 More swimming today - first of all at Florence Falls, not that far from Buley's Rockhole, and then back at Wangi Falls. We also tried to visit the historic tin mine remains, but it was closed off for some reason.

9/12/08 We left Litchfield and drove back to Darwin for the night, ready to drive to Kakadu the next day.