Lawn Hill Day 2

Upper gorge from a lookout

Gulf snapping turtle

Indarri Falls from lookout

Another great day at Lawn Hill. Today we did the western side walks in the morning which I really enjoyed – they were a perfect mixture of walking over the top of the gorge cliffs with good lookouts over the falls and the walls of the gorge, and then walking right down the bottom along the thin strip which runs right next to the gorge wall and next to the river. The river banks are thickly covered in pandanus and palms but sporadically you can look through to see the green water, a small group of archer fish or, as we did, some gulf snapping turtles mooching around, which were really cool. Again we were up and out early so that it wasn’t too hot, and we had done our 7k and were back by 11am for a looooong game of monopoly which Conor loved and the rest of us…. merely lived through. Staying a couple of days and having the walks so close to the tents has made it easy to get up and out early, then mooch around the tent during the hot part of the day (kind of like a siesta but without the actual siesta) and then go out again in the afternoon, a much pleasanter way to be. This afternoon we did the one remaining work to us, the Wild Dog Dreaming walk which takes you to the eastern side again and to a small rock art site which was nice, largely because it introduced us to petroglyphs as well, or rock etchings. They were mainly circles carved into the rock but there was one series of lines which looked like a fish which was cool. They are much older than the paintings (10,000 years old as opposed to 6,000) so although it’s hard to comprehend people doing them that long ago, it’s still pretty amazing. Apparently there’s archaeological proof that people have lived here continuously for 30,000 years, now that’s hard to comprehend. We also saw quite a few middens during the day along the eastern and western sides, mostly mussel shells. I’ve even convinced the kids to have a quick cold shower here (more a case of sticking various parts in rather than their whole bodies) which at least cleaned their feet a bit. Tomorrow we’re off to the southern part of the park, to the Riversleigh fossil site.