(written by Dave)

Bird feeding in The Big4 park in Batchelor was good – lots of corella, galah and rainbow lorakeets. The maintenance man in the park was the feeder. He’s been around for a few years and had some good information about the birds and their habits. He knew some of the bird families by their regular visits.

We were up the following morning pretty early. We had to ride back into Batchelor for supplies before we rode the 48k to the campsite at Florence Falls but we heard that the campsites in the national park fill up early. That turned out to be a good plan as later that day each of the campsites at Florence Falls had 2, 3 and 4 different groups per site. Because we got to Florence Falls about noon we had “owner’s rights” on our site, one of the last vacant sites. This let us decide who we shared with – we picked a family from Belgium who were just starting their tour of the Northern Territory. Some sites filled up with lots of “20-somethings in vans” – not that we aren’t hip, but all night guitar sessions don’t work so good when you are cycling.

Litchfield National Park boundary was about 20k from Batchelor. There were lots of cars and tour buses on the road but not too many cars coming out. The road in was pretty narrow and not overly scenic. Pretty much the same thing we’d been seeing for the last 3,000ks or so. We got lots of toots from the cars and stopped for photos at the park sign.

A little way into the park we came across the magnetic termite mounds. Grassland termite here live where the ground water is very high. This means that their whole structure has to be above ground and temperature control is more difficult through the wet and dry seasons. These particular colonies have figured out how to build with large north and south faces on their mounds. They move inside the mound to the north (sunny) side in the morning to get warm, then back to the south side in the arvo to avoid baking. Pretty clever for a termite.

The park road goes up and down a small escarpment a couple of times if you follow the full length of the road. This means some climbing and descending – with one section even earning the name “jump up” – Aussie for “it’s bloody steep mate”. And it was steep for our 3,000 ks of flat legs. We were both in granny/granny gears but at least we didn’t have to walk.

Florence Falls campground, our stop for the first night, is right near the actual falls. Ater setting up the tent, taking showers and having some lunch, we put on our swimsuits and headed over. The main falls are quite impressive. And so was the crowd at them. With a number of the other swimming holes closed because of crocs, this one was packed. We took some photos and headed upstream where we found a couple very small, almost private pools. They were not very deep but they were empty and above the hoards at the main pool. We had a nice dip and chilled nicely from the day’s heat. From here we went on a big loop walk up one stream bed and down another. It was only a couple K in length but it was quite nice, mostly rain forest and stream crossing. There were a surprising number of completely dry ferns – I later learned that this one particular fern is supposed to go completely dry during the dry season. I took lots of photos of the various pools – a very nice way to spend the afternoon.

Once back at campground, we watched the campsite scrum begin in earnest. All in good fun for most of us. There was an old Aussie guy in a spot near us who would not share with anyone. He ran numerous folks off his site with some colourful language. We were more than happy to have “guests”.

Today we had an even shorter day to Wangi Falls but we were still up early. We planned on stopping at all the sites and figured that we would have another scrum at the campground. The morning traffic was very low allowing us to even ride side by side for a while. With the limited camping in the park, it seems that a lot of folks come here as day trippers. Our first stop of the day was in Tableland Swamp. Quite interesting to see a swamp up on the top of the escarpment. It was a short drive off the main road but no cars stopped. We got some pictures, keeping an eye out for crocs – fortunately we did not see any.

Next stop was Tolmer Falls – another short drive off the main road. By now, the cars and buses were starting to arrive and the parking lot was filling up. The walk down to the falls pretty long but the view was nice. Nancy didn’t walk down as one of us had to stay with the bikes. She stayed back and talked to a bunch of other visitors – you can’t help but attract attention on touring bikes. I offered to watch the bikes but we ended up just chatting more and then headed off. From Tolmer Falls it was about 10k to Wangi Falls. We arrived in time to get “site ownership”. The sites here are further apart and the facilities generally better. There are fewer folks because they have closed the swimming due to a croc (a big fat one) being caught not too long ago.

We showered, ate lunch and then headed out to explored the falls. As you can see from the photos below, Wangi Falls is one of the best in the park. Not allowing swimming makes the whole scene a little calmer and less manic. We ended up walking the entire falls trail after visiting the falls. Here, the trail went up the escarpment and over the upper creek. Nice view of the creek and over the flatlands beyond the park. But it was pretty hot and we worked up quite a sweat.

 

The campground scrum followed the walk. Nancy invited a nice mother and two girls to join us in our site. Two other folks just pulled up and started unpacking while we were over at the common picnic tables – hope they are not loud and don’t plan on a fire… Hopefully that will be the last of it for tonight but we’ll see…