2006/06 Australia trip - Florence Falls in Litchfield |
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Wednesday June 21st
From Edith Falls we drove all the way north to Darwin on the coast. Back in Standley Chasm I’d dropped my long Tokina telephoto lens for the umpteenth time and that time it had landed sideways on a sharp rock, denting the cylinder. This stopped the autofocus from working and eventually it required too much muscle power to even focus manually, so I was looking for a new lens.
For once, everything came together. We drove to Darwin’s city centre, got a brief glimpse of the Arafura Sea, and quickly found a camera store that stocked Canon lenses. The store had one Canon telephoto lens almost as long as the Tokina I had broken, and at a reasonable price too. So we bought the lens, Sandie got her hair cut a few doors down, and we still had time for a coffee and to buy more drinking water, before getting back to the camper just before the meter ran out. Are parking meters the sign of civilization?
So that was all we saw of Darwin on this trip. We’d spent a couple of days there in 2002, so we knew our way around the city. One night we’d stayed at the Shady Glen caravan park, “closest to the city centre” and had a miserable night in the heat and humidity, squeezed between a German “capsule bus”, with its army of campers, and the 24-hour freight terminal across the road.
This time though we had enough time to get out of the city and zoom a hundred miles back down the highway to Litchfield national park. The park is famous for its waterfalls, which drop from the escarpment onto the sandstone plains. We drove into the park through clouds of smoke from “controlled burns” in the bush along the road, removing the build up of undergrowth.
We took the 4wd track to the Florence Falls campground as this seemed most likely to have room, and we took the last slot there. It seemed a quiet spot, but the undergrowth was always moving with possums on the prowl. The sky was also alive: lots of shooting stars. A walk around the campground with my headlight on showed hundreds of diamonds sparkling on the edges of the path. On closer inspection, the diamonds turned out to the eyes of spiders, reflecting the headlight. I don’t know if this is unique to Australian spiders as the headlight was new for this trip. It has very powerful LED bulbs, and is many times more 
powerful than my old one.
Thursday June 22nd
Litchfield’s waterfalls are at their best in the rainy season, but they can only be seen easily after the floods have subsided and the roads reopened. Our first stop was at Florence Falls, truly beautiful, with a pair of falls dropping into a deep pool, ringed by lush monsoon forest.
Unfortunately, a couple of buses full of teenagers arrived at the same time as us. We managed to get down to the falls but there isn’t much dry land around the pool and just about every rock was full of bodies. We learned that Wangi Falls, the favourite spot, was closed to swimming, so everyone came to Florence Falls to swim. The Darwin area has plenty of rivers, lakes, and ocean beaches, but only a few places like this that are safe from saltwater crocodiles and jellyfish.