Day 99 – 26th August – Kakadu

We packed up camp and started heading south today.  Maybe it’s a false hope, but here’s hoping it gets cooler as we go…

We stopped at Yellow Waters for a quick look.  It was another wetland much like all the other wetlands we’ve seen so far… 

We ducked into the accommodation lodge here (Cooinda) for an icecream.  Megan found some frangipani flowers, as you do in a tropical climate…  

From Yellow Waters we kept on our southerly path to a place called Maguk.  Maguk will be forever in our hearts as our favourite place in Kakadu…   We dumped the camper at the campground, which incidentally, is bush camping at its best… there were only us and two other groups in a bush setting.  There were birds galore (saw our first quails) but unfortunately there were also flies and mozzies galore too.

Anyway, we dumped the camper and headed straight into the falls.  Our lovely boat driver at Twin Falls had said his favourite place were the top falls at Maguk, so we were full of anticipation.  Here’s the walk in… Aiden is standing at the spot where we cross the river. 

A gorgeous pool along the way, of course, no swimming.  Not sure why we can’t swim at the pools along the way but we can swim at the end?  Don’t know how that works? 

This is the plunge pool at the base of the Maguk Falls.  And you know what?  The water was NOT cold!  For the first time on our trip the water temperature was what you expect in the tropics… bliss! 

We made the long swim over to the falls 

After our first exploratory swim it was time to find these top pools we had heard about.  There had been nothing about them written on the information sign and we hadn’t seen any paths leading off that way.  All we could go by were the people we had seen walking along the top of the falls and disappearing off to our left, so we had to assume there was a path there somewhere?  We found a way to cross the river and then we went bush… beating a path along a non-existent track that was hopefully leading us to the right spot.  After about 10-15 minutes of scrambling over rocks and through the bush we stumbled over a path… yes, a proper track… would have made life much simpler had we found that from the start!

We followed the path to the cliffs overlooking the plunge pool.  Here we are looking back down on the spot where we initially entered the pool. 

A little further along we spotted the top pools.  This is the climb down into them.  It’s hard to tell but that dark patch in front of Megan and veering to the left are the pools. 

Here’s a better view.  The water flowing off to the bottom right of the photo is flowing over the waterfall and down into the plunge pool.  The water at the back left is coming from more pools and cascades around the corner.  The thing is, these pools were deep… deep enough that we spent ages jumping and bombing from the rocks. 

Proof that even Mum can be an idiot… 

We swam up and around the corner to find a narrow channel.  At the end of the channel there was a small waterfall from the pool upstream. 

Maguk ticked all the boxes for our little family… there were interesting pools that we could explore and there were pools deep enough to jump into from great heights.  We had an awesome afternoon doing exactly that…