Darwin to Litchfield

Magnetic termite mound

Cathedral termite mound (Daniel grumpy at having to pose for yet another photo)

Florence Falls

Conor in his new crocodile tshirt purchased in Darwin

We left Darwin this morning feeling like it was a day too early, but also needing to keep going in terms of the time that we have left. We took the trailer back a third time to Tim, the guy who was fixing it for us – he’s a very nice guy and did a fine job in the end but it just seemed to take forever, and he was a perfectionist, so kept coming up with better ideas. We met him at a parts shop and he offered to fix the suspension for us, which was the urgent repair we needed, and then since he was a welder/blacksmith, we thought we would ask him to also put a bash plate over the water tank since the hoses keep getting hit by stones and broken. It took him longer than he thought to fix the suspension, but at least he got that done on Saturday when we had to bring the trailer back to him for the day, then he measured it up for the bash plate, and put it on this morning on our way out of Darwin. So it was longer than we would have liked, with more tooing and froing, but a lot cheaper so shouldn’t really complain. He was a nice guy too.

Once that was finally sorted we headed out for Litchfield National Park, stopping first at the magnetic termite mounds just inside the park. There are a mixture of cathedral termite mounds and magnetic termite mounds there, the cathedral ones are incredibly tall, and cathedral-like, and the magnetic ones are only a couple of centimetres thick and completely flat. Apparently termites can’t take big fluctuations in temperature, so most termites move underground for the heat of the day. The magnetic termites however for some reason can’t do that, so they have to regulate the temperature of their mound by aligning it north – south to catch the early morning and late evening sun. So in the morning they hang out on the eastern side of their mound, in the middle of the day the mound is very thin so doesn’t get much sun, and when it cools down in the evening they hang out on the western side which still retains the warmth from the afternoon. Very clever.

After a brief look at them we set up camp at Florence Falls which is a bit dusty and the campsites are pretty small, but otherwise seems pretty nice. We’ve put up all the annex walls, having been told that mozzies are bad at here and at Kakadu, and once we’d had a late lunch we walked down to the waterfall, which has a nice pool to swim in. After the heat of the day it was nice to cool off, and the falls are quite picturesque, but we both commented that we’re getting a bit spoilt for gorges and waterholes when we think that these ones are just ‘ok’. I guess we’ve seen an awful lot of gorges and waterfalls over the last 4 months, so they have to be pretty special now to stand out!