Day Sixteen - Litchfield NP to Darwin

it was back to the buley rockhole at the crack of dawn to wash off all the blood and mosquito body parts. confucius say: when in paradise, fkk.

we took a detour down to 'the lost city', a bunch of rock formations dotted with human excrement and toilet paper.

we walked from the pestilential greenant creek to the average experience of tjaetaba falls, where one could bathe in a rockpool whose edge formed part of a 20 metre drop into the forests below. sounds amazing to even think about, but the murky waters and lack of view contrasted sharply with the other incredible places we had been.

and in our final stop before darwin, we visited florence falls. florence falls is a special place, with a plunge pool filled with massive fish and boulders, fed by two cascades, and packed with humans at any time of the year. young hoons with perfectly sculpted bodies and perfectly absent brains were climbing to the top of the waterfalls and doing flips off them to the amazement of the adoring crowds gathered below when suddenly, as if in some sort of shared religious vision, the ranger appeared (materialised?) at the top of one waterfall and started shouting in a macho voice for everyone to climb down (or was it the virgin mary wearing a ranger's outfit, fake beard and a very large pair of socks stuffed down the front of her pants?). in an act of defiance, all the hoons did their final backwards cartwheels from the 10 metre cliffs into the shallow waters below. it was amazing to watch, but i got that sick feeling in my stomach that someone's neck was going to snap, reinforced by my memories of all the young people with cervical spinal injuries that i saw when i was working in darwin (shudder). one guy (who was doing the most impressive flips) had even lost the skin off his nose and forehead, as if he'd already smacked his face against a rock at the bottom of the water. a strong candidate for the darwin awards.

it was at florence falls that i received one of the best compliments i've ever had in my life. a young frenchman overheard g and i talking and joined us for a short conversation whilst perched on a boulder in the middle of the plunge pool. afterwards he turned to me and asked "so are you belgian?". "so are you belgian?!!!" i almost had to be carried off in a stretcher.

when we'd had our fill, we decided to jump back into jasper and head off to our final destination. a minute before leaving, we found g's doppelgänger lounging on the banks of a river in the form of a goanna. the head and limbs were a bit different, but the jellybelly was unmistakeable!