Packed up as usual and headed off, soon turning east onto the Kakadu Highway.

A nice little tailwind pushed us over the first half of the ride to the Mary River Roadhouse. Unfortunately the second half of the ride was without a tailwind. The heat compounded with increasingly hilly terrain to be a little unpleasant. So we were hot and tired by the time we reached the road house for an ice cream. Still we recovered and reluctantly mounted the bikes for the last eight kilometres to where we thought the Moline waterhole turnoff might be. Just over the river we came to the entrance to Kakadu National Park. A flash sculptural entrance statement. Here some friendly locals from Kakadu took our picture, assured us that we were mad and wished us well.

Only a few kilometres later we saw the mail box and the turnoff to a very low key, rough track. Still, onwards. A bit over a kilometre of bouncing over rocks later we found the busy little car park. A half hour setting up camp and changing then off down the track to the beautiful little rock pool and cooling water fall.

Quite a party was going on at the falls. It looked like a scene from an American teen movie with lots of jocks climbing the rocks and adoring bikini-clad girls relaxing on the rocks and in the still water. It turned out it was a party made up mainly of the grandchildren of the American geologist who had ‘discovered’ the pool while searching for uranium in the area in the early 1950’s (there is a diused uranium mine a few kilometres from here). Just to show that not everything is as it seems, this lovely rock pool is actually not natural, having been made when the the miners dynamited the cliff to form a dam below the initially very small plunge pool at the base of the falls.

Most of the party goers left with the sun leaving us to our camp dinner.