On Day 27 of our tour Charlotte and I got ready to visit the Wangi Falls at 9am. We brought all our bathing stuff with us and were ready to jump into the water when we discovered this sign.
We knew already about how salties get removed before the start of the dry season and therefore the tourist season and that salties still can get past the traps. but the waterfall itself didn't look too nice and the water way too dark for our liking. So we decided to go for the 1.7 km walk to the top of the walks instead through some nice rainforest.
As you might have noticed we wore our thongs (flip flops) as we didn't plan on this walk. Half way through it is quite flat and with proper made stairs. But then it got very rocky and I just wanted to get this walk over with, especially as the lookout from the top wasn't really nice as well. You didn't even see the waterfall, just the creek that leads to it. But we saw some spiders, of course...
After this warm up in the morning we drove to the Cascades, so further West into Litchfield National Park. We just wanted to get to the lower Cascades to finally have a snice swim but after this 1km walk the waterflow didn't look really nice. So we turned around, went back to the crossing and headed up the hill to the Upper Cascades, another 1.7km. We saw some Dragon Flies on the way.
When we finally reached the upper pools I went in for a swim. Charlotte sunbathed while I spoke to another Australian family. Kind of Grey Nomads: retired people who drive around in their mobile homes for months or even years at end and discover the country like you actually should do!
We didn't stay too long and descended down again past Curtin Falls and crossing the creek in several places. Luckily we had changed at the carpark into proper footwear to do this walk.
We had lunch at the carpark, rice with beans for me and fruit salad for Charlotte. We decided to go back to Buley Rockhole as it was so nice the day before. Charlotte did a few head jumps into the pools.
Unfortunately it was much more crowded today than the day before and I actually couldn't really enjoy myself as much. At 3:30pm we had enough and made our way to Batchelor to fuel up our Johnny Cash car and then headed towards Palmerston. We had spotted a free camping place on the way but as it was so early in the day we wanted to make the most of it and went to the Palmerston market for a shared Mango Banana Lassi.
We also had dinner there, we had different varietes of noddles with curry. Then we sat down and watched the first half hour of a children puppet show called "The amazing drumming monkeys". And I tell ya, they were great! Seriously, it was so much fun to listen to them and to also see the children around us having a fantastic time!
Anyway, we didn't stay for the whole show unfortunately as we wanted to make it to Darwin. And that was a great mistake! We hadn't expected to find it so difficult to find a legal place to stay. We have been warned about drunk people and especially drunk Aborigines and also the high fines of illegal free camping in the city, so we wanted to stay in a caravan park. Just, they were all full. I mean like ALL of them! We went to four different parks and then came across a British young couple in a van who looked for a place to stay for 1.5 hours already. We had a long chat what to do but then separated again. We drove down South on the highway again looking for a rest stop area and luckily called into the Noonamah Tourist Park (Noonamah is 40km South of Darwin). They had some spots available at a cheap rate. The British couple made it to this park as well. We settled into our spot next to the fields of cows and got to bed at 9pm.
Our next stop the next day: DARWIN!
Yours swimming-and-a-camping-spot-searching Stefanie
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Have your say now! Would you do the same thing or would you do it differently? Do you have any travel tipps for me for my onwards travels? let me know!