Limmen NP

Sunrise at Limmen NP

View of Western Lost City

Southern Lost city

Just a driving day today, and a relatively slow one, because the road isn’t great. We started on the Carpentaria Highway heading East for a change, which is mostly a one lane dodgy tarmac road interspersed with potholes and short sections of dirt, which made it kind of slow – you have to pull to the side to pass cars so you both have one set of wheels on the tarmac, or pull over completely in a hurry when you meet a big road train! We only saw one of those though. We had lunch at Cape Crawford roadhouse and then took the Nathan River Road north to where we’ve made a roadside camp in Limmen NP. We decided it would be easier to camp a little way up (this road is all dirt and supposed to be pretty bad), then tomorrow we’ll just take the car up to see the Southern Lost City (which is why we’re here) and then hitch up again to drive into Borroloola. It feels pretty remote out here, once we turned onto the Nathan River Road I don’t think we met any cars, although now another one has turned up to bush camp with us. It also might be because we’re in the very southern end of the national park, and I think most people come in from the top end, via Mataranka. Very peaceful though!

Today we explored a small bottom section of Limmen NP – and it still feels remote out here, even though we passed a few cars today. We left the trailer here by the river (its colour is perfect camouflage and means that it doesn’t stand out) and drove in the car and it turned out to be a good idea – it wouldn’t have been impossible but there were lots of river crossings and the road was pretty bad so it really would have slowed us down even more. We went first to the Southern Lost City, a site of towering sandstone formations that were first split by being pushed up from underneath and then weathered away to tall tapering columns and towers, some of which have a lean like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. They look pretty cool anyway, and the walk around them takes you up to a ridge where you can look out at the Western Lost City, which apparently is much harder to get to (you have to organise getting a key and the road is even worse).

We left so early in the morning that it was still early when we were done there, so we kept going a bit further north to Butterfly Springs, which the people sharing our campsite last night recommended. It’s a lovely little pool fed by what is now a trickle of a waterfall, where we gave our hot and smelly feet a wash before having lunch at a picnic table there. True to name there were lots of butterflies there, plus lots of red dragonflies, bowerbirds and cockatoos. It’s really pretty hot here, even at night, so we’re rocketing through the water – drinking it that is, as there’s no way of washing ourselves, you’re not allowed to swim anywhere except Butterfly Springs because of the threat of crocs. Tomorrow it’s in to Borroloola to get supplies – mainly fuel, water and ice and keep heading towards Lawn Hill NP.