Sparrow Lorelei photo gallery

Darwin trip, 10-17 July, 2010
Part 2 - Berry Springs area, geocaching and Litchfield National Park

We're in Southport, half ghost town leftover from the gold rush over a century ago, and half new settlement with people moving in for the country life. This is the site of the former police station, there's little here but foundations and a lot of bush. We're looking for a geocache, appropriately named "Southport Police Station". I'd made a list of five or six geocaches in the general area of Tumbling Waters and the Cox Peninsula Rd if we wanted to look for them. That turned out great for Monday as Chris was feeling pretty sick so he stayed home and slept and we went out exploring.

It took a while to find the right bit of foundation that had a film canister hidden under it, especially as the GPS didn't always update when we only walked a few metres (I think it's much more designed for driving with than walking with). The clue was very helpful, and got us there in the end. In the course of looking I found this lovely male cycad flower. All the cycads are flowering at the moment and the females have these lovely but strange-looking bunches of nuts on top, but I don't think I ever managed to photograph one. Cycads are a weird plant regardless. It was nice to see some though after so long not really seeing them in Victoria.

Our little adventure on the way to the next geocache. The NT uses these broken kerbs a lot, and I was driving a car much wider than I'm used to, and the kerb swung out a lot on the left just at the exit from this information bay. One bump and crunch later I'd wedged the undercarriage of the car into one of the breaks in the kerb so that we couldn't go either forward or backwards. I didn't think that was possible, but apparently if you try and steer out of your acccidental kerb-crossing at just the right angle you can do it. You have to be quite precise to get it that stuck though. Yay me. The car behind us stopped to help and in no time at all had found a piece of wood exactly the right size to use as a ramp to re-cross the kerb (we thought he might have done this himself before given how quickly he solved it!), I gave the keys to James (who is much better at getting cars out of stuck spots than I am, I tend to be too gentle), and a few minutes later we were freed. Phew. We didn't make it to the next geocache though as I'd written down the coordinates wrong - we knew approximately where it was supposed to be (somewhere between this information bay and the historic airstrip just up the road) and the GPS was telling us it was a few kilometres away still. So we went back to Berry Springs instead.

Berry Springs was beautiful. This photo really doesn't capture how green and lush it was. There was a big park area leading down to the springs, and we figured the geocache was somewhere in that. You can see Sparrow and Grandma standing and looking around - James is behind the tree in the middle. Eventually Mum walked down to look at the springs while Sparrow ran around nappy free on the grass in the shade with me, and James went hunting for the spot where the geocache was. It turned out to be in the bush on the other side of the carpark. We looked but didn't find it, so thought we should check the calculations for that one as well when we went back to the cabins.

By Tumbling Waters, we've pulled the car over to look for the geocache that's there. The cache description reads "Cross the road to see why it's called Tumbling Waters". If you go down through here there's a river with lots of tiny rapids. We could have walked a lot more on the walking trails near our campground, but just didn't get to it. There's only so much walking you can do in the day, even in winter. After lunch we found planning to drive places or take it easy was a little more reliable way to spend a few hours.

The ubiquitous Turkey Bush, a Calytrix which was all over the place in the savannah bushland and which is apparently a seasonal indicator that marks some kind of progress through the Dry. I didn't catch the full details as I was looking around trying to work out which bush would most likely be called Turkey Bush. I didn't guess this one.

Looking for the cache. I liked the look of the savannah, though I did enjoy the more palm-and-lush-tropical look of the planted public amenity areas. Even here the trees sometimes had huge leaves. I couldn't believe how big one eucalypt's leaves were - longer and wider than my hand.

Found it!

Back at Berry Springs in the afternoon. Turns out the cache calculations were fine, we just couldn't find it even when we had another thorough look. We came back in the afternoon and had a gorgeous swim at these springs. Beautiful warm water in lovely colours, tall trees with lush leaves, pandanus leaning over creeks that linked the pools, rainbow bee-eaters flying overhead and chasing the dragonflies that came down to hover just above the water. Really magical. Pity about the large number of vodka and beer cans in the pools just off the steps, and the smell left by people who've decided to spend the day down here drinking. -shrug- It's a popular day-trip spot for Darwiners, and probably seems normal to the people who live here.

Clothes-free time that evening. We didn't take Sparrow into the springs - the pools were mostly too deep for us to stand in (except at the edge where the cans were!) so it wouldn't have been easy to manage with her. The only way in was by jumping in or climbing down a ladder so getting in safely with her would have been a challenge. And I don't know what the meningitis risk is for water of that temperature. So she and James played springside while Mum and I swam. When we came back to Tumbling Waters we took her to the pool there. Slightly cooler but still nice water temperature, part-chlorinated and part-salt. And excellent shallow steps for bringing her into the water with us. She had a great time - pools are just The Thing. Afterwards we gave her a rinse off in the laundry trough and then I let her run around on the grass by the cabins without any clothes. Special treat for a warm place - she doesn't get to be clothes-free at home at the moment. I thought she'd love running around on the grass, but she seemed more interested in climbing on me.

"OK, *now* I'm outtahere. I'll just go... this way." Eventually she got the idea she was free to roam, and went exploring. The creek down below eventually got her interest. Unfortunately I didn't want her to go there alone - it wasn't running but there were puddles of shallow water and (apparently) snakes. So when she got down there I called out for her to stop. To my surprise she did stop, though it was a bit hesitant and you could see the conflict between this cool thing right here and Mummy calling out all the way over there. So I resolved the conflict by coming down to get her. Which she immediately took as "Oh, Mummy's coming too so it's OK to go this way" -grin-. She was quite disappointed I didn't let her play in the creek. She did get to talk to two other little girls, sorry, vampires who don't drink blood but only eat lizards because they're good vampires (got to get these things right apparently), who were camping in the tent area just on the other side.

Tuesday, and we're off to Batchelor and Litchfield. There are a lot of things we might have done differently on this day in hindsight, knowing what we do now about the different spots. I was really quite keen to see this butterfly farm and I think I wasn't the only one. It was beautifully set up with lots of features designed to make it a sort-of-on-the-spiritual-or-business-side retreat, but we happened to come on a day when there were only a handful of butterflies out and about. We saw one Ulysses and one Birdwing which were quite special, and a couple of other pretties as well, but when we were just wandering around out in the bush we saw a lot more. And there's no entry fee out there. So nice to have seen it, but we probably wouldn't stop there a second time unless it was a particularly good season.

We had trouble getting one little baby to come with us into the second enclosure because the doorway was too interesting. Somebody had priorities.

The garden swing at beginning and end was a good place to stop though.

The gardens were very pretty. This is the view from the swing. Sparrow loved the huge falling water rock feature at the end of the lily pond.

One of the wins for the day was to do with Rum Jungle, the former uranium mine just outside Batchelor. Christopher was quite interested in finding out more about it, particularly in the environmental impacts. When we stopped at the info centre at Batchelor it just happened that the guy on was a former mine worker who had maps and descriptions and all kinds of tales about it. So Chris got a pretty long and detailed conversation about it all. The upshot was that we couldn't actually go anywhere near the minesite, but that there was a second site that had been filled in as a lake that was now a picnic area. Appropriately it was called Rum Jungle Lake. So we came here for a stickybeak and a possible swim and wander to see if there was anything to see. Chris was the only one of us who ended up swimming though.

I was intrigued by these bush figs growing out of the bark of the trees by the lake. I assume they were figs. They were covered in tiny ants too.

Then, on to Litchfield National Park, a highlight of our trip and someplace we all really wanted to go to. We were all ready for waterholes, but the first thing you come to is the Magnetic Termite Mounds. They're called that because they have a very distinctive thin structure aligned north-south - but it's solar thermal driven, not magnetic at all. The termites that build these mounds live in areas that stay pretty wet and sometimes flood, so they can't go down into the ground when the temperature gets too hot or cold in the upper parts of the nest. Instead they build the nests to capture early morning sun on the east face so that the nest warms evenly and quickly and then stays fairly stable in temperature for the day. It was quite amazing to see this "river" of grass stretching off in both directions as far as we could see, filled with these nests that all line up like tombstones. And then you look just to either side of the grass, where the flooding stops and the trees start, and there's no more of these mounds. Instead you get the cathedral termites, building huge orange-brown structures like drippy castles. Very clear boundary between the two. Here's three ladies of different generations experiencing the boardwalk.

Florence Falls. We were all ready for a swim. Mum and Chris and I hopped straight in the water while James and Sparrow explored a little. I swam out to one of the falls and under it which was quite magical, if very hard work. Then back to the rocky stream leading out of the plunge pool, and time to dunk Sparrow in. The water was pretty cold, but she didn't seem to mind being splashed a little.

This rock pool thing is a lot of fun. All this splashing water! After this swim we had some of Mum's scones and walked up the long path to the top of the plateau again. The way we took down was on the order of 150 steps, pretty but hard work. The way up was longer but scenic, wandering amiably through wet forest and dry savannah woodland, with interpretive signs discussing how Nature designed gardens of these types with rock features, water features etc.

We went on past a couple of other possible stops (including some fruitless searching for a geocache - imperfect technology and low blood sugar were not combining in the best of ways) to Wangu Falls, the most scenic of the falls. And it really was. Quite stunning. Unfortunately there was no swimming there - the late end to the Wet meant the water levels were still too high, so currents too strong and probability of crocodiles having come up the river also too high. But we looked around a bit, skipped the treetop walk as we were a bit tired and climbing a lot of steps sounded more than we felt like, but we did have lunch. It was three o'clock by then, so we were definitely ready to eat something.

We chose to go back via Batchelor instead of risking the rental car on an unknown length and quality of dirt road on the short route to Tumbling Waters. The delightful bit about this was that we had another swim, this time at the Rockpools that were just down the road from Florence Falls. Sparrow could have played here for hours.

There were other children jumping around and splashing and playing and you could see she really wanted to join them. But walking on the wet slippery rocks was well beyond her at this point (not that it totally stopped her trying). Instead she just tried to pick up and hold the whitewater as it went over the rocks, or just held her hands in it to feel it. She got quite cold again, but she very clearly didn't care because it was all too much fun.