As I said earlier, Daintree NP seems to be the most famous of Queensland’s parks, but we were told by numerous friends who’ve traveled around Australia that Lawn Hill NP is not to be missed. And they were right.

Boodjamulla (aka Lawn Hill NP) is not on the way to anywhere so it is easy to miss. It is a beautiful oasis in the middle of a vast expanse of highly degraded pastoral land near the Qld-NT border. Finally we were able to camp next to a swimmable waterhole without any estuarine crocs so we spent most of our days in the water. We also hired a kayak one day and paddled up stream as far as we could go.

Of course the wildlife didn’t escape our gaze, especially the purple-crowned fairy wren, buff-sided robin and freshwater crocs.

Nearby is the World Heritage listed Riversleigh Fossil site were you can walk around one of this dig sites and see bones from the extinct Thunderbird (which stood 2.5 meters tall and weighed 300kg), a turtle and a giant freshwater crocodile.

After resting and recharging our batteries in the cooling waters of Lawn Hill gorge for a few days we made our way into the Northern Territory.