After our last still 26deg night of restless sleep listening to my whistling kites in the distance we faced very humid hot packup for our last day in Kakadu. We headed to Maguk Gorge first on our way to Gonlom. A relatively easy walk in compared to yesterday with a bit of clambering over rocks at the end but not too bad. Cam eyeing off the croc management buoys and satisfied himself that the teeth marks were only freshies so he could swim feeling safe! Walking right next to the river in the middle of very swampy monsoonal paperbark forest was making mummy quite nervous, especially as some of the path was a walkway clearly caged up to waist height for safety. Assuming that with all the people around the crocs would have taken one of them before we got there I satisfied myself similarly to Cam that it was fine to swim! Definitely school holidays with stacks more families around, the ones who had bad colds betraying themselves as southerners. Feeling inwardly grateful for missing half of that this year I very graciously forgave them their lack of ‘track’ manners. One lady walking in in thongs mentioned to me she thought ‘they’ should just put up a boardwalk all the way in. I guess one day that all these gorges in Kakadu will be accessible by a boardwalk to cater for the larger and larger number of tourists and the Gibb will be more like Kakadu is now. The plunge pool at the waterfall was humming with people, making it more difficult to get changed but if they want to look that’s their problem isn’t it! Water temp was beautiful compared to Jim Jim Falls and another long swim over to the waterfall wishing we had remembered the noodle again! Stu getting much better at kicking on his back finally which has helped enormously. We were on a bit of a schedule to do two falls in a day so reluctantly got out and headed down the road to Gunlom. A pretty shaky road for the most part, took us nearly an hour to drive in, Matty reluctant to start a big driving day tomorrow with that road, so we decided to head to Pine Creek for the night to be a little on our way. We came to climb to the infinity pool but my legs were aching just looking at the mountain we had to climb to get there. They didn’t mess around when they made this track, pretty much 500m straight up to the top of the falls, but well and truly worth it as everyone told us it would be as they were coming down. Proud of how track fit the kids are, we scooted up there in 20mins, mummy v glad if anyone was coming the other way so we could have a rest. We could see for miles at the top, all of the South Alligator river region, but the best thing was the infinity pool, you can swim right up against the edge (quite safe as there is another lower pool before the falls) and soak up the vista below. There were about four pools up the top here and we enjoyed mucking about and contemplating how many gorges / waterfall pools we have been to on the trip- we are up to 14 including Gonlom, so lucky to have had the chance to do so. Mixed feelings about leaving Kakadu as now we are turning south and heading home, although none of us sad, least of all Matty that we’ll not be driving on any corrugations anymore.
We made it to Pine Creek by 5:45 and checked into a tiny place called the ‘Railway Resort’ had a beautiful meal in the little pub they’ve done up in old railway style. Currently sitting outside enjoying no mozzies and the prospect of a much cooler 15 degrees overnight.