1 August 2016 – 181 340
Butterfly Gorge and Douglas Hot Springs
A two-hour drive, one hour of it a 4WD track covering 17km,
took us to Butterfly Gorge Nature Park.
https://nt.gov.au/leisure/parks-reserves/find-a-park-to-visit/butterfly-gorge-nature-park The track had a few hairy spots where we hit the bash plate on the car,
and several water crossings which came over the running boards.
Butterfly Gorge does not look like anything
much from the car park, or even from the lookout walk. Once you descend into the gorge it opens out
into a large, very deep waterhole that has cliff faces on one side and sand on
the other. It is possible to swim across
the gorge and then climb up into the next waterhole, swim across it (it is a
lot colder than the main one) and then climb again up to another large, very
deep waterhole. We spent quite a while
enjoying each waterhole. The rock faces of the gorge were incredibly smooth
from the passage of water over many years, and had some beautiful colours in
them.
Next stop was the Douglas Hot Springs where we ate a very late lunch and
then spent a couple of very relaxing hours lying in the shallows. https://nt.gov.au/leisure/parks-reserves/find-a-park-to-visit/tjuwaliyn-douglas-hot-springs-park The water where it came out of the spring was
far too hot to be comfortable, but a little way downstream it joined a creek
filled with cold water. Sitting just
upstream of the junction the water was mainly warm, with occasional bursts of
hot or cold water depending on the water currents and other people’s movements
in the water. There were many small fish
that would come and nibble at the bits of dead skin on your feet, elbows
etc. I could have spent all day lying
here, just serene! In a smooth section
of the dirt road, we gave Hayden his first ever driving lesson – he appeared to
enjoy it. On the road on the way back toward the Stuart Highway we saw the
largest piles of hay bales I have ever seen, they were really, really high.
We also encountered our first corrugated
bitumen road – it appears that anything and everything can be corrugated in the
N.T..
Mum
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