29th & 30th April - Litchfield NP
On 29th April we did another couple of happy hours pre-breakfast birding at Buffalo Creek before starting our tour of the National Parks. Today we headed 100km south to Batchelor, where we stayed on the Butterfly Farm for 2 nights. This was an amazingly characterful place to stay; very 70s arty, with music playing all the time that was absolutely to my taste. It was started and run by a chap who made his wealth as a London stockbroker before dropping out at the age of 40.
Our purpose in being here was to visit the Litchfield National Park. The tourist access to this park is set up as a series of walks to waterfalls and rockholes, strung out along ~60km of road. (The road completes a circuit, but the northern section is unsealed and beyond the scope of our hire car).
Our purpose in being here was to visit the Litchfield National Park. The tourist access to this park is set up as a series of walks to waterfalls and rockholes, strung out along ~60km of road. (The road completes a circuit, but the northern section is unsealed and beyond the scope of our hire car).
In the afternoon, we visited the termite mounds site. Here there are two types of termite mound – ‘cathedral’ and ‘magnetic’. As a spectacle, the cathedral mounds here were no more impressive than the many we had seen along the road. The magnetic termite mounds presented a flat surface to the east and west, so that one side is always in the shade – we didn’t see these anywhere else.
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Then we decided that since it was so hot we would drive to the furthest of the tourist sites and walk to the Cascades. Here we discovered that people essentially use the park to get very hot while walking to the water; then have a swim to refresh; and then get hot and sweaty again walking back to the car. Being fairly close to Darwin (where you can’t swim in the sea due to box jellyfish) this seemed a remarkably popular pastime. Although the walk was only 1.7km each way, it was totally exhausting in the sapping 35℃ heat. We hadn’t gone prepared to swim but we did dip our legs in the water and replace the sweat soaking our shirts with fresh water.
On the return journey we stopped to admire the impressive Wangi falls.
On 30th April we visited some of the other sites on the tourist route through Litchfield NP, most involving short walks to a view point overlooking a waterfall: Florence Falls, Buley Rockhole, Tolmer Falls and a more prolonged walk around Wangi Falls.
Despite spending several hours in these areas, the best birding was from the quiet streets of Batchelor. |