Florence Falls

We Should Have Bought the Pool Noodle at the Servo This was before Wangi Falls, earlier the same day. We pulled into Florence Falls right around one or two in the afternoon, which is not when you want to be doing anything active in the Top End, but it turned out to be exactly the right time to be getting into cold water. Florence Falls is inside Litchfield National Park, a bit over an hour and a half south of Darwin, and it shares a road with Buley Rockhole, so the two are easy to hit on the same stop. The falls themselves are fairly modest by waterfall standards — twin drops of somewhere around 10 to 15 metres — but what people actually come for is the plunge pool underneath them, and that thing is enormous. Down the Steps, Into the Deep End Getting there means going down roughly 160 steps, which everyone online complains about and which is, fairly, worse on the way back up in the heat. There's a second option too, a longer path along Shady Creek that skips the stairs, but we didn't know that at the time and just took the direct route down. The pool itself is deep almost from the edge, pear-shaped, tucked into a pocket of monsoon rainforest that makes the air feel about five degrees cooler the moment you step into it. That temperature drop alone was worth the stairs. The Pool Noodle We Didn't Buy At a petrol station on the way in, there were pool noodles for sale, something like five dollars each. We looked at them, decided we didn't need one, and kept driving. Big mistake. Once you're actually out in the middle of that pool with nothing solid under your feet, a pool noodle stops being a novelty item and starts looking like a genuinely sensible piece of equipment. We ended up just swimming it out ourselves, which was fine, but if you're not a strong swimmer or you're bringing kids, buy the noodle. Every servo near the park entrance seems to sell them for a reason. We weren't the only ones without one, at least. A few other visitors were doing the same slightly ungraceful doggy-paddle-and-hope approach across the deeper section, so we didn't feel too silly. Worth Knowing Before You Go Florence Falls flows year-round, and it's generally considered one of the more crocodile-free swimming spots in Litchfield, though conditions and closures still shift with the season, so it's worth a quick check of NT Parks' current swimming advice before you head down. It gets busy — by the time we left there were easily thirty or forty people scattered around the edges of the pool — but it never felt crowded in a way that spoiled it, just lively. We swam for maybe twenty minutes before heading back up those stairs, sweaty again within about a minute of reaching the top, which felt slightly unfair after how cold the water had been. Still one of the better swims of the whole trip, and we hadn't even gotten to Wangi Falls yet. If you're planning a Litchfield day around swimming spots, it's worth reading our waterfall safety guide beforehand — croc-country swimming is a different game to a regular rock pool, and it's better to know the basics before you're standing at the edge deciding whether to jump in.