Uluru - Australia's Heart

Hi everyone, today I am going to take a little side-trip from my Half Lap of Australia.
and take you to the beating heart of Australia, Uluru in Central Australia. 

Litchfield National Park, Northern Territory - half lap of Australia, Part 5

Hi everyone, this week we continue north from Katherine and Adelaide River which we visited on my last blog post about the Northern Territory leg of our 13,329 kilometre half lap of Australia.  

Our next stop was town of Batchelor and the Litchfield National Park in the top end of the Northern Territory.  It was only a relatively short drive from Katherine, 287 kilometres, and even with our stop at Adelaide River, we arrived around 1pm. 

The town of Batchelor is about 97 kilometres from Darwin and about 20 kilometres from the edge of the Litchfield National Park. We booked into the Litchfield Tourist Park which is located 14 kilometres from Batchelor and only about 4 kilometres from the entrance to the National Park. You can also camp at one of the bush camp sites in Litchfield, however these don't have power and only limited facilities.  We were more than happy to pay a little extra for power, shade, facilities and swimming pool. They also have a restaurant.

Hunting for wild orchids, Western Australia

It seems to be a shame to miss the wild orchid season while I keep you in the Northern Territory on my half lap of Australia so for this week I am going to drag you away from my travels and back to the south west of Western Australia where the wildflowers are blooming. If you missed it, I did share a few local wildflowers back in September.

Katherine & Adelaide River, Northern Territory - Half Lap of Australia, Part 4

Hi everyone, and welcome to Part 4 of my Half Lap of Australia. 
This week we will travel from Western Australia into the Northern Territory, and visit Katherine and Adelaide River on our way to Darwin, the capital of the Northern Territory. 

We had not visited this part of the Northern Territory before, so this is all new territory to us. You can see a rough map of our trip through the Northern Territory on the map below, the main locations showing with a red dot or red print. 


Leaving Lake Argyle and Kununurra (last week's blog post) we crossed the border into the Northern Territory 63 kilometres from Kununurra. From there our trip takes us to Katherine, Adelaide River, Litchfield National Park, Darwin, Kakadu National Park, Mataranka, Daly Waters, Karly Karlu (Devil's Marbles), down to Alice Springs in central Australia, before reaching the Northern Territory/South Australian border. 

We left Lake Argyle at around 6.00am which incidentally is 7.30am Northern Territory time. We had lost and hour and a half crossing the border. The time difference and that we had 510 kilometres to travel today to our next stopping place, Katherine, was the reason for the early start. Also we were travelling over new ground, so there were gong to be places we wanted to stop and look at. My diary records that the sun was already "a burning red ball above the horizon, lighting up the rocks red and shimmery across the long grass."