On our way to The Top.

At Mataranka we entered the top end, I don't know if that is official, but it felt like it to me. The country changes, the vegetation is different, you enter the part that has a wet season and there is a high concentration of Places To See.
Mataranka is the spot that has hot springs. It has 4 different caravan parks and a National Park.
We opted to stay in the Jalmurark campground in Elsey National Park. It's a drive to the thermal pools but it has a river.
It turned out to be a great little campsite. The sites are well spaced. Each has a fireplace and most have a table and a well-watered grassy area. It looked like we were looking out on a back yard!

We canoed on the Roper River down to Mataranka Falls which are small cascades. I baulked at getting the canoe over the small cascades and exploring futher.
Instead we paddled back to the campsite where there are pontoons floating in the river allowing for a nice-enough cool off.
Then we canoed up-stream and cam to a delightful rocky spot with some more cascades. We chickened out at shooting the rapids back down! haha.

The next day was my birthday. And I was thoroughly spoiled with pancake breakfast. Coffee and scones for morning tea in Mataranka township and barra and salad for lunch. We were in time to witness the barramundi feeding at the Mataranka resort, which was an added bonus. Then we spent the afternoon floating down the warm current in Bitter springs. It was lovely.
As we had a decent lunch we decided to just have snacks and treats for dinner. so we bought what we could at the little shop in town, plus we had some homemade hummus and some Jamie Oliver pesto. Finished off with passionfruit and mango cheesecake form the Stockyard Gallery where we had morning tea.

The day after that I suggested riding our bikes to Mataranka Homestead and Springs to burn up some calories. It's about 15 kms maybe, took us about an hour along the road. We were disappointed to find that you couldn't easily put a canoe in the river there as there was a locked gate otherwise we might have gone back later on.
Instead we rode along to Stevie's hole - a nice deep hole where the water in cooler than at the thermal pool and it has a nice little sandy spot, beach almost.

As we hadn't taken lunch we bought something at the resort cafe, in fact we shared a barra burger (#2 for the trip) and chips and watched a bit of the movie We Of The NeverNever which they show every lunchtime. The movie was based on a book that was written about life on Elsey Station by Jeannie Gunn. The replica homestead that they built for the movie is nearby.

Then it was time for another thermal pool dip. Mataranks hot springs is lined with stone and concrete but is still nice. It also wasn't too busy, just a dozen people there although the overheard conversations were "interesting"!

There is a foot track that runs from the resort near the river all the way back to our campsite. So we set off along it and got as far as the first picnic area where we cooled off in the river, then the track was too rocky to bike ride on so we headed to the road stopping off at the other picnic areas along the way and having another dip at the pretty rocky spot that we had canoed to on day 1.

G said it was OK from there back to the campsite, along the foot track, but I still had to do a fair bit of hopping-off-and-pushing!

So that was a lovely few days that we spent at Mataranka.
I think we are really into this travelling life now.
G is relaxed and happy.
We are loving our little caravan.
And have got packing up and setting up down to a fine art - at least it is a lot less stressful and we have managed to not damage anything for a while!