Giant Termite Mounds

Litchfield National Park is an hour and a half from Darwin down the Stuart Highway (which continues to Alice Springs). Most people go straight to Kakadu but I've read great things about this place so made the executive decision we were heading out here first.

First stop are the giant termite mounds at the side of the road and in a designated boardwalk area further up the road. If you've never seen a termite, they're just big ants (probably twice the size of the sort we have in Britain) so these mounds they build are another feat of engineering on pretty much the same scale as the telegraph cables from Java.

They build them by chewing up the earth and plant material and combining it with saliva, then they live in them. The colour of the mound obviously depends on the colour of the earth in any particular spot. The ones we're standing next to are called cathedral mounds and the grey ones stretching into the distance are more like gravestones, the latter being aligned east to west to make best use of the sun and the prevailing winds (the termites who build these seem to have some inate ability to align their mounds in this way. The ones who don't have the ability to do this just build crap mounds and they don't survive, so it's all about natural selection, though I'm sure David Attenborough would put it more carefully than I can).

It was hot here and the flies were just becoming a problem, which is starting to freak Ella out a bit (she doesn't like them landing on her face).

Later in the day the cathedral mounds took on a really eerie appearance, the shadows cast by the sun low in the sky turned them into giant upheld hands or row upon row of effigies of the Virgin Mary or just groups of people huddled together. I wouldn't fancy driving through here in the moonlight.