Tour Australia

We end week 5 and start week 6 in Katherine Gorge which is within the Nitmiluk National Park. On our first full day, which just so happened to be the Saturday of a long weekend in the Northern Territory, we hired a double canoe and headed up the gorge.

We met for the canoe hire at the specified time of 7:45am with a crowd of people, collected our PFD’s, our paddles and boarded a boat to be transported up to the second gorge. After a short 10 minute boat ride and a small walk over some rocks we collected our canoe and started paddling up the river. The gorge was quite deep, the water not so bad and the rock walls amazing.

We eventually made it to the end of gorge 2 and scrambled over some small rocks to gorge 3. We paddled up gorge 3 and came to a more sizeable rock scramble. After negotiating the rocks we saw we only had 50m of water before the next rock scramble which didn’t give us much encouragement. We had a chat to a young couple who were making their way out of the gorge to get a guage of how bad they would be. We felt encouraged that they thought this was one of the worst ones. After making it over the rock scramble we stopped for some morning tea.

We kept paddling and after a couple more rock scrambles we made it into the start of gorge 6. we decided not to proceed further as there were some large successive rock scrambles. We turned around and made our way back to Smitt Rock for lunch and to spend some time swimming.

After a couple of hours of enjoying the water we made our way back down the gorge, over the rock scrambles and back to the boat. We had a great day and paddled around 13km over the course of the day.

The next day we prepped ourselves to leave Katherine Gorge but before we left we walked the Baruwei Loop walk. It was around 5km but felt much further due to the heat! It was a very rewarding walk and gave us a great view of Katherine Gorge and out beyond the gorge down the Katherine River. We would highly recommend doing this short walk.

From Katherine Gorge we headed back to Katherine and then up towards Edith Falls. Due to it being so busy at Edith Falls we camped outside of the National Park in a rest area not far.

The next day, being the 1st of August, we headed into Edith Falls. The day was already starting to heat up but we decided we wanted to see everything we could so we set out for Sweetwater Pool which is the furthest walk. It was a 4.5km walk out to it and you are greeted with a nice uphill section first. After the first uphill it is not a difficult walk but it is very exposed to the sun and feels very hot. However, Sweetwater Pool does not disappoint and is a great reward for taking the time to get out there. It has a beautiful big pool with clear water and then a series of small water falls into some smaller pools. The big pool has refreshingly cool water and the smaller pools warmer water. We thoroughly enjoyed the swim!

We then headed back down the track and then down to the Upper Pool. It has a nice waterfall and a huge swimming area. There were lots of people swimming here, however, it didn’t feel overly crowded.

After cooling off and having a swim we continued around the loop track to a lookout which overlooks the middle pool back towards the upper pool. This was definitely worth coming to and gave us an amazing perspective of the area.

We made our way back to the Jeep via the Lower Pool which was full of people floating around on their pool noodles and the water felt much cooler than the upper pools. From here we continued driving north and camped just outside Kakadu National Park.