Steve and Dee's Australian tour: Elsey National Park. NT.

Onto Elsey National Park, where we have set up camp for 2 nights-whoopee they give you free firewood here already chopped!! The Roper & Waterhouse Rivers run through here. It’s very pretty and excellent for bird watchers. We had a wander round the 12 mile stock yard, and headed out to Elsey Memorial Cemetery, which was very interesting. Elsey homestead replica was next and well worth a visit (Especially constructed for the film “We of the Never Never”. We also went to the thermal pool which is constant temperature of 34 degrees. How lucky were we as a small brown snake was taking a swim with us, cause for entertainment and for me to leave the pool twice!!

We did a 4.1 klm walk each way to Mataranka waterfalls and well worth the trip, on arrival it had lots of small waterfalls & rock pools, one rock pool was like a Jacuzzi, of course Steve went in for a while!!! The vegetation is all paper bark trees & Palms, very pretty. We were back at camp for 1200 and headed off to see Barramundi being fed at Territory manor- another must see and very interesting, Steve got to go in and feed a barramundi, these barramundi were only small at 5-6kg. W while we were here we saw turtles, peacocks & rainbow honey bee eater (Very pretty). Next we headed off to Bitter Springs (Koran) – a 5 star tropical spring – fed thermal pool, set amongst tropical bushland. It has to be seen to believe, stunning, a strong currant so you can just float along the 200 meters plus, however swimming back takes more effort, and if you get your mask & snorkel and look underneath the colours are fantastic!! Just a tip for all you girls out there when swimming these thermal pools don’t wear knitted Italian swim wear, as we both saw today, that they fail to keep your breasts covered!!!! I could have drowned because I was laughing so much!!!!

We visited the Mataranka sheep dip, the Aboriginal Army camp - 1942.