Mikey got up early to phone home this morning so I got to lie in until 6am. We drove around picking people up and then went out to Litchfield National Park, in the general area that we'd spent a few days recently. Our first stop was at the Florence Falls, a large waterfall in the jungley forest. We ony saw it from the top as there were hundreds of steps to go down, and Owen, our driver and guide, said there are easier places to get to to swim.

One of these was the Buley Rock Holes, a series of small waterfalls that left rock pools to swim in. It was gorgeous, the water wasn't too cold, and I could jump off the rocks into deep, deep water. It was hard work swimming up to the waterfall itself as the force of it kept pushing me back and no matter how hard I swam I wasn't getting anywhere. Which was fun.

Then it was time for lunch and we had another barbecue. I found a great traditional mosquito repellant - it's called DEET and it comes in little bottles, but only from England. You can't get it in Australia. It works well, too!

We went for another river cruise after lunch and this was the best of them all. It was on private land and only one boat went on it. After a 40-minute struggle on incredibly bumpy unpaved red dust roads (it looked like Mars but with more trees and water buffalo) where everything was the silvery-green of eucalyptus bushes, we came across the most gorgeous, verdant stripof green grass, and the river. It looked like a bit of unspoiled English countryside, if you swapped the pelicans for swans and the mango trees for oaks. And the crocodiles for trout. And the wallabies for rabbits, but you get the idea. This was a huge, untouched wilderness, with wonderful bright green trees and lilles all overthe water. There were crocodiles on the banks, giant salties and smaller, more vicious freshwater ones. There were pelicans and storks and egrets and sea eagles, tiny kingfishers and bee-eaters, and a lovely little fellow with a technical name, also known as the Lilly-Trotter bird who hopped across the surface of teh water to search for food.

Again, the cruise was over far too quickly. We had to drive back along the bumpy unmade road, past masses of wallabies in the shade, and we stopped at our final swimming place for the day, Wangi Falls. Another lake fed by a couple of waterfalls (this one with 'Crocodile Safety Tips' on a board that said if there are crocodiles in the water don't swim there), so of course I had to go and play in it. The wind caused by the water pouring down the cliff was almost enough to knock my sunglasses off and it was really hard to swim under it. I bashed my toe on a rock as I got sucked in, but I managed to escape more or less unscathed! On the other side of the lake was a rock face made of a weird kind of silica sandstone which was incredibly hot. Apparently this isn't caused by geothermal activity or the sun, but it's the temperature of the earth at this point, a disticntion I don't really understand. The result is that the water trickling down the rocks (which is torrential in the wet season) forms deep holes as it falls and this is heated very quickly. The water running off the rock was hot, and the rock pools were deep baths of warm water, only a few feet across but much deeper. We didn't have long enough there, but Mikey and I managed a bit of a clamber before we had to go back to the bus.

The last stop for the day was at the giant termite mounds, which Litchfield National Park is famous for. Termites build these enormous structures to store food in, and they act as shelter when the ground floods in the summe and the fins regulate the interiour temperature. They are up to 20 feet tall, the ones we saw were about 8-10 feet high, and for humans to achieve the same feat, you'd have to have a millio of them, all blindfolded (cos termites can't see) and they'd have to build something over 2 miles tall. Quite impressive.

While we were here we saw tiny green tree frogs, the last thing on my list of things to see, which made me happy. I couldn't take proper photos of it because the tree it was on is the most evil of spikey bushes, but Mikey took some nice ones, one of which is on the photo page.

The other side of these huge termite mounds are the ones called 'magnetic' mounds, built on a north-south alignment. They are not as impressive, but there was a field of them, called the graveyard because of the shape of them, and every single one is lined up perfectly. This has something to do with regulating their temperature because of the path of the sun up here, and they are only found in the top end of the Northern Territory and nowhere else in the world.

The moon was still a freaky golden smile this evening, and Owen dropped us off at the Mindil Beach Markets which are here every Thursday night. The atmosphere is nice, there are stalls selling absolutely everything you can imagine but there are so many people it seemed a bit claustrophobic. We walked back into town had a quick supper before they closed the kitchen and then I phoned home again to try and use up the phone card. We had to do some laundry and pack our bags and we weren't in bed until gone midnight, but it was a great day. It's nice to leave Australia on a good note, knowing that we definitely want to come back and see more of it (when we have some money!).