Fishing, Flooded Roads, and Crocs

The East Alligator River crossing (poorly named by some crazy British explorer, there are no alligators here) between Kakadu National Park and Arnhem Land is about 70km upstream from the ocean. At low tide the river is flowing normally, and the crossing has about 10 centimeters of water running over it. It can easily be crossed in a four wheel drive vehicle. As the tide comes in, the water starts flowing back in the opposite direction until the crossing is covered by over half a meter of water. The area attracts four things: drivers crossing the river, fishermen, crocs, and gawkers (us).

We also didn’t see anybody get his car overturned while doing the crossing, but every time one drove across all the fishermen stopped to watch.

From what we heard, a truck overturns here once a year. At high tide there were more than a few trucks that approached the edge of the crossing, paused for a little bit, and then started quickly backing away. Discretion is the better part of valor.

The other entertainment for the fishermen was playing find the croc. This one was maybe 40 yards away from where most of them were fishing.

And then a guy in a boat showed up to fish. And he tied up his boat 6 feet from where a crocodile just submerged. The croc was almost as big as the boat, Mekayla said I might finally get some scale for taking pictures of the croc.

Now I know that these guys have probably been fishing croc infested waters all their lives so maybe it isn’t a big deal, but one of the fishermen on the bank yelled out “You do know that there is a croc there don’t you?” and the guy just went on starting to fish. We weren’t sure if he hadn’t heard, or had seen it and didn’t care, or if he was just crazy.

So let’s review: trucks fording through river, fishermen on the banks, crazy boat fishermen, Aussie bravado, and salt water crocodiles. This is the most entertaining spot on the planet. We returned here many times.

Driving on the Left

I think I spent the first few days in Australia carefully watching how everyone was driving and worrying myself about looking in the correct direction whenever I approached an intersection. There were lots of subtle things that cropped up that I had to get used to, but they really didn’t turn out to be too hard: rotaries go in the opposite direction, slow lane is in the left not the right, etc.

But the one thing that I still can’t break out of the habit of is that the turn signal is on the opposite side of the damn wheel! This means that invariably when I’m about to go and pass the road train (truck pulling 3-4 trailers) that is going 30 km/h under the speed limit, I end up turning on my windshield wipers. Nothing takes the wind out of your sails like the sound of bone dry wipers scraping across a windshield in 90 degree heat. And Mekayla’s chuckling as I fail to signal properly for the 40^th time doesn’t really help either.

Back from the wild

Sorry, this post got a bit delayed due to an urgent need to go snorkeling, more on that later.

Before we get into posting some stories from the past week I just figured I’d give a quick summary. We whole-heartily recommend Kakadu National Park in Northern Australia. It was absolutely amazing, and we did get used to the heat (though I did sweat through my shirt every day we were there). The wildlife, incredible landscape, and Aboriginal culture and rock art all in one place make for a great mix of things to learn about. Hopefully I can find some time and way to upload all of the pictures we took, but here is a taste of the local wildlife:

That last one is either a wallaroo or a wallaby. We really have no idea how to tell the difference. They hop like a kangaroo, but are quite smaller. Can you tell?

Just getting to Kakadu itself was quite an adventure. Everyone has seen the kangaroo crossing signs, but the crocodiles next five kilometers kinda surprised us.

Alas, we saw no crocs crossing the road. Then once we entered the Park we had to drive through fire (literally) in order to get to our camping site. It seems the Aboriginals are still keeping up with their millennia long tradition of cleansing the forest with fire, so there are lots of small fires going on this time of year.

We’re now sitting in Darwin airport waiting for our 1:40AM flight going to Cairns. Ideas of exactly what we are going to do are still percolating, but certainly the Great Barrier Reef will be involved.

Winter is HOT.

At least in Darwin it is. Though the nights are quite nice. Rather than drive-in movies we went to a deck chair cinema and watched a movie under the stars.

Hmmm… The sign across the street is inviting us to “Swim with the crocodiles!” I think we will refrain from taking them up on the offer.

Jet lag is mostly over, and today the camping begins. We won’t have any internet access for 5 or 6 days and so won’t be posting. We’re off to explore the rainforest.