Darwin

On the Adelaide river
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On friday morning we packed up, had our last cold/warm shower and headed for Adelaide River to see the jumping crocodiles.

Only 3 weeks before we got here this whole river flooded and it is feared that a lot of the crocodile eggs drowned, though sometimes e crocodile can delay laying her fertilized eggs for up to 6 months.

jumping crocodiles

The Adelaide river has a saltwater crocodile every 75-100m along both sides of its banks. I'd say that is quite well populated!

A salty
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These saltwater crocs or salties as they call them, come into these waters for about 3 months out of every year to clean their salt glands.

Well it didi not take us long to see the first salty, having a porkchop dangling from a stick as a free meal is appealing to them. The crocs do jump, we saw some get their back feet out of the water (which is the half way mark for its body length).

The kites that were flying around there also got fed. not much of the food landed in the water. They swooped down pretty close to the boat.

That's how you catch these things
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Later in the afternoon we went to a place called windows on the wet land which was great hands on stuff for the kids.

The Digeredoo Hut was our next stop, a neat place full of aboriginal art. Ian is longingly looking at them, but they are so hard to transport. You can make your own here and learn to play them too.

Very interesting.

It was so hot we really neede to find a place to swim so we drove down to this dam. The ranger was right there and told us that this water was fine. He said he saw 3 fresh water crocodiles laying on the beach here last night, which means there are no saltwater ones around. More people came in the water later but we did not go past our knees!!