Litchfield National Park

PARADISE

Hibiscus

What kind of tree is this? What kind of fruits are those???

Yay - that's right! These are Mango's!!! Wow!

And what is this stuff? Johannesbrotschoten mit Johannesbrotkernen. Weird!!!

On the third day after a relaxed departure we headed towards Litchfield Park. Litchfield is famous for its scenic beauty, waterfalls and safe swimming. No crocks! ;)

On the way back to Darwin we drove through the township of Batchelor. Our tour guide told us, that this en miniature castle was build by a man from Roumania who was quite homesick. Unfortunately he died before he could finish it and see his work in its full beauty.

Litchfield National Park, covering approximately 1500 km², is near the township of Batchelor, 100km south-west of Darwin, in the Northern Territory of Australia. Each year the park attracts over 260,000 visitors.
Proclaimed a national park in 1986, it is named after Fred Litchfield, a Territory pioneer, who explored areas of the Northern Territory from Escape Cliffs on the Timor Sea to the Daly River in 1864.

Termites build nests to house their colonies. Nests are commonly located in larger timber or in the soil in locations such as growing trees, inside fallen trees, underground, and in above-ground mounds which they construct, commonly called "anthills" in Africa and Australia, despite the technical incorrectness of that name. Mounds (also known as "termitaria") occur when the nest grows beyond its initially concealing surface. Two to three metres, however, would be typical for the largest mounds in most savannas. The shape ranges from somewhat amorphous domes or cones usually covered in grass and/or woody shrubs, to sculptured hard earth mounds, or a mixture of the two. Despite the irregular mound shapes, the different species in an area can usually be identified by simply looking at the mounds.
The sculptured mounds sometimes have elaborate and distinctive forms, such as those of the compass termite (Amitermes meridionalis & A. laurensis) which build tall wedge-shaped mounds with the long axis oriented approximately north-south. This orientation has been experimentally shown to help in thermoregulation.

We visited Florence Falls, Wangi Falls and Buley Rockholes and walked through beautiful rain forests

Uranium was discovered outside what is now Litchfield’s eastern boundary in August 1949, by a local prospector, Jack White. Australia’s first fully operational uranium mine was opened at Rum Jungle, and underground mining occurred from 1950 to 1953.