Well, a day on land at last. No complaints from us on either score as we have thoroughly enjoyed ourselves so far.
Awake 1 minute before the 6:30 alarm just before the ship berthed and it was a bit misty, but already warm.
As a general rule, for future cruisers, I try to post a bit of useful info here:
Ship berthed on the starboard side.
Our el Cheapo, $30 Vodafone pre-pay phones worked. To clarify here, we are both on a $20 a year minimum top up plan, called their ‘International Plan’, (which they tend not to advertise), For those like me who only use a phone very rarely indeed, this plan has no monthly charges, no specific roaming or overseas Sim cards, so is ideal to carry in the older cars, as an extension to the tool kit. The fact that it seems to work wherever Vodafone has a presence, is a useful bonus. We don’t expect it to work in the USA or Canada.
A fairly quick breakfast before getting sorted for “Chris’s Crocks Tour”. Privately arranged by a local resident who had rounded up 30 of us from the our Pacific Circlers, Cruise Critic Group, at least several on the tour were already known to us. Now Chris is a tireless worker for various causes, including the Scouts and either I had misread her email or she had put in a typo, but I’d already paid her something but not enough as it transpired – and she never said a word!
Anyway, we trooped off the ship and assembled dockside until our 33 seater coach arrived – which wasn’t long. Much to Chris’s surprise, we were all on time and (relatively) well behaved, which as any ex-Akela knows, is not like dealing with cubs or whatever they call junior scouts these days. That is usually more akin to herding cats.
CROCS
Against a surprising amount of incoming Darwin traffic, along a stretch of road currently being dualled, the top end of the Stuart Highway, which I believe goes all the way to Adelaide. We made good time and arrived early at the ‘Jumping Crocs’ river boat experience. Early enough for some to grab a coffee. There was a piano in the café area but I found to my acute disappointment that after a three year break beak from ivory bashing, not only was my left hand still unable to stretch an octave and hit the keys correctly, but I’d also forgotten the first few bars of the few tunes that I used to be able to play. Ho hum. Hopefully the hand exercises I’m doing will assist and some strength and dexterity will return.
Whilst standing on the river bank before our tour started, we could see quite plainly, a couple of crocodiles on the opposite river bank. This is no caged experience. These crocodiles are in the wild – an so were we.
We piled onto the boat and given due safety warnings by Rod, our excellent guide. “Don’t put your arms or hands outside the boat. Crocs have a reaction time up to 40 times faster than ours and will grab anything, even low flying birds.”
Off we set. Feeding crocs inside the river markers attracts a $6500 fine… Once past the markers, it seems that not only do these local crocs seem to be fairly territorial, inasmuch as they frequent the same stretch of water, but they have all been named! Rod kept hanging chunks of meat out on a pole, first to the port side, then to the starboard side (nautical terms for left and right for you landlubbers). Needless to say, most people were standing on one side or the other and getting a decent pic wasn’t very easy, as not only did the crocs eventually grab the meat, and do so very quickly, but there was usually someone in the way and no, I wasn’t going to lean out of the boat.
We saw crocs ranging from two who were only a couple of weeks old (they are born complete, meaning with razor sharp teeth), to the acknowledged senior croc, a massive 6.1 metre specimen, who Rod swears, knows his voice…
Female crocs lay between 60 and 80 eggs at a time but the survival rate is about 2. They really are tough cookies and any fight usually means the loser gets eaten by the victor, at any age/size.
One of our group who shall be nameless, to save any embarrassment (I deliberately won’t remember her name anyway), managed to sit on her bottle of sunscreen, which then covered her posterior, so to minimise the amount to be mopped up, allowed us all to scoop dollops of sunscreen off her hands and arms!
The hour went all too quickly, and a quick visual check showed that we still had 30 people, 60 arms and 60 hands so most still seem to be intact, as far as I could tell anyway.
Part 2 to follow – internet slow… See above post. Five days later, this post still wouldn’t send.
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