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Published: September 6th 2009
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Day 132 - Daly Waters to Mataranka
A big shout out to young Dan Howells who turns 18 today! Happy Birthday Dan, hope you have a great day and well done again on passing your driving test! Everyone was up and about bright and breezy this morning, not a sore head insight. Well, I expect there were a few but they were well hidden!
We said our goodbyes to Joyce, Pat and little Kosta and headed out on the highway bound for Mataranka. Another short journey today which would lead us to some Thermal Pools! Thermal Pools? In this weather?!
We pass through the small town of Larrimah, another place with important WWII history and one which is quite an interesting stop by all accounts but we push on as we want to try and catch up with the blogs! We’re managing to write them each day but the uploading is passing us by with a mixture of time, energy and internet access to blame!
Mataranka is a small town which a lot of people will either drive through without stopping, maybe stop just to taste the local Mataranka Pie or they stop for a dip
in the thermal pools. There are various camping options and we eventually settle on the Mataranka Homestead Resort which houses, in a round about way, the Rainbow Springs Thermal Pools and rather a large family of Little Red Flying Foxes, which in themselves are a pretty neat natural phenomenom! At times it is thought that as many as 250'000 could be roosting above the pools!
The camp spots are spread over a wide area so we choose one that doesn’t have great big trees over it, just little ones that the bats won’t want to roost in!!
First things first, a swim to cool off! It’s so hot! God it’s hot! Hot diggity dog! There is a pathway taking you to the thermal pools and the Waterhouse river, so off to the river we trundle figuring it will be cooler! We watch where we step as the yellow, quite smelly bat poo litters the pathway! I’m not making it sound very attractive am I! It’s actually a lovely, pretty place and there are lots of walks you can do but it’s far too hot for that sort of carry on, swimming is the only activity that we’ll be
doing today!
We pass the Thermal Pools which look very pleasant, we'll come back to those in a wee while! When we reach the river there's a ladder descent to get in and the signage tells us about how the rangers leave permanent crocodile traps set up and that swimming is safe but sometimes the odd croc might slip through without being noticed! La la la la la la, swim swim swim, what was that against my leg, oh it was a log, that’s ok then. “Hun, have you noticed there’s no Aussies swimming in here?!” We’d been joined by a young French couple, the lad got in with us but the girl choose to sit up the top of the ladder unconvinced! We were sure it was perfectly safe or else we wouldn’t have dared enter the water, not with Salt Water Crocs anyway but Freshies are ‘Ok’, or so they say!
We made our way back to the thermal pools after the difficult transition onto and up the ladder from the river! We laugh when we find the temperature in the river was actually warmer than the pools! The Rainbow Spring thermal pools are part of
Elsey National Park but the resort sort of acts as the entrance so it gets a bit confusing, the important thing to remember is that the thermal pools are free and you don’t have to stay at the resort to visit them!
Something we didn't do was explore the homestead and the local park but depict elements from a book that Mataranka is often referenced to. ‘We of the Never Never’ was written by Jeannie Gunn about life as a pioneering woman on Elsey Station back in 1902. It's a book that I've promised myself I will read before we end the trip.
We're a bit more refreshed after our swim so we get some more chores and blogging done as we’re still trying to find the balance between catching up and doing stuff at our new location!
We’ve been told that nearby Bitter Springs is worth a visit and oh boy they are. It has to be the best result at the end of a 10 minute drive in a ridiculously hot car! With almost un-natural but beautiful nevertheless blue green waters and palm fringes this is the most inviting waterhole we’ve come across. There’s a
current here which you use to float about 300m downstream, clamber out using the ladder and then walk back to do it all again. It’s a little piece of heaven with a constant temperature of 34 degrees. Swallow too much of it and the dissolved limestone particles leave a bitter taste in your mouth but definitely not your memory! We got the snorkels out and practised duck diving, Darryl is far better than I am but I did manage to reach the bottom of the waterhole. It was fabulous with the snorkels because the water was crystal clear and you really got to appreciate what you were swimming in!
When we got back to the campsite we really noticed the smell of the bat poo but managed to scoff a quick ice-cream each and then headed back to the water! We also wanted to watch the bats as it’s nearing ‘take off’ time and we don’t want to miss that! They’re fascinating creatures to watch but very hard to photograph! We heard that the rangers have been trying to discourage them from roosting here because there are so many. We think we're lucky because the numbers in comparison to
what we've heard about from other years are much lower. Tony and Jane couldn't even come in to the Thermal Pools last year because there were so many!
The Little Red Flying Foxes eventually soared to the skies around 6.30, as soon as the light started to fade away. What a great sight, there were far more than we'd thought! What with watching them and looking out for the peacocks and wallabies we had a great wildlife watch!
The hot sticky night continued and we wonder if we’ll ever get used to the humidity that we’re driving towards for the next couple of weeks. Look out for photos of Darryl accompanied by a frizzy haired person from now on!!
Dar and Sar
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Jan Kettle
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'Little' Flying Foxes!
Those Flying Foxes don't look little to me - but they are cute aren't they! Could you see a sky full of stars at Mataranka? xxx Mum