DARWIN TO LITCHFIELD NATIONAL PARK

Left Darwin on Sunday 16th,  drove to Litchfield National Park and camped in the Wangi Falls campground.     This campground was quite large with mostly individual camping areas, no power but water was available to boil before drinking.  We made use of this water for washing, washing up and boiling for coffee and only used our tank water for drinking, this worked out very well.  The campground was very well maintained with very clean ammenities (toilets and hot showers) and the bbq's in picnic areas were cleaned every day.
We camped there for 6 days and except for the excessive heat (40 degrees each day) with no power for air conditioning we enjoyed it very much.     Each day we were able to walk to the pool below the waterfall to swim and cool down, it was a life saver.
The National Park rangers put on three different talks for free, one was about the Bamboo Creek Tin mine which is now abandoned, the next was a slide night about the flora and fauna in Litchfield and the work the rangers do all year round to maintain the park including catching crocodiles during the wet season and burning certain areas to reduce the fire hazard during summer.  The third was a talk about the termite mounds, the magnetic mounds, the cathedral mounds and the piping mounds and also the life cycle of the termites.   All these talks were very interesting and informative.
We spent another day driving around to the other water falls within the Park.   Some required quite a walk to access them and some were along 4  wheel drive tracks that we did not attempt as we were told they were very corrugated.  One of the better places to swim other than Wangi, was Buley Rockhole which was very popular.   We also drove into Batchelor to do a bit of shopping and to have a look around.  It is a small but nice town with plenty of shady parks and a few conveniences.

 Swimming hole at Wangi Falls

 Wangi Falls

 Magnetic termite mounds

 Cathedral termite mounds

 Buley Rockholes

 Bamboo Creek Tin Mine

Picnic area at campground Wangi Falls

 

We left Litchfield for Katherine on Saturday morning intending to stay in a caravan park so that we could have power for airconditioning and also to have our car fridge looked at because it is not working on 12v.