I will say up front that I was disappointed with this day. I'm not sure if the whole trip was supposed to be more leisurely, with plenty of time for everything, but the way this day went, I ended up feeling that what we were doing was a 2-day itinerary that had been stretched to fit 3 days. Most of what we were seeing was up in the northeast portion of the park, but our camping area was down in the south part of the park, some 100 or 150 kilometers away. This left us with an hour and a half of driving to do to get to a spot with an activity, and the same to return to our camping area. Nevertheless, it was a nice park to look at as we drove by. We were supposed to go to a river pool with a waterfall, go for a swim, then climb the escarpment to get a view out over the whole park and then go see a couple of other pools to do some more swimming (these did turn out to be quite near the camping area), before returning to camp for dinner and sleep. This is what happened.
We got up early and had breakfast. It was a nice morning and the day promised to be quite hot and sunny. We headed out on the road for our first hour and a half of driving on the day to arrive at the Gubara Pools walking track. We first headed down another track. Gander wanted to see if there were any Leichhardt's grasshoppers still around, although he thought it was a bit too late in the season to find them. They weren't there, but we did start getting a nice view of the park while walking along the track. The walking track to the Gubara Pools was also quite picturesque.
Although we were headed to the pools, we encountered a lot of people, and Gander seemed to have an aversion to people, so we waited for a bit. Then we went to another little pool, with the intention of climbing the escarpment first for the view, then returning to the pools. The little pool where swam first was called Wallaby Falls. It took a while to figure out that the reason for the name was that there was a wallaby painted on the rocks. It was a nice little pool, although our attention was sidetracked for a little while by the loss of Richard's sunglasses that he inadvertently wore under the little waterfall feeding the pool. While we were there, a couple of other groups came by and ascended the escarpment. And Gander changed his mind about climbing up at that point in time. He thought we should go to Gubara Pools first and then return to the escarpment afterwards. So we did. It was a nice place to swim and there were lots of little fish swimming in the pool. After the pool, Gander decided that we weren't going to climb the escarpment that day. We would go for lunch, visit some other waterfalls and pools and then head back to camp. We went to a park office area and had lunch and then headed back down towards camp.
While we were driving, Gander spotted (and I have absolutely no idea how he did it) this lizard sitting up in a tree. The tree was a good 30 meters off the road, the lizard isn't that big and its colouring is such that it really looks like part of a tree. In any case, he did and we had a photo opportunity. After the photos, it was freed and scampered quickly back into the bushes and trees. Then we headed on our way. When we reached the spot for the other waterfalls/pools, it was getting quite late and Gander decided to add that into the next days activities and head to camp instead. So in the end, we did 4 to 5 hours of driving to swim in a couple of pools. We were mostly disappointed.
Dinner was really good though, boiled corned beef with mashed potatoes and chocolate cake for desert. Yummy!!! And sunset was quite nice as well.
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