Outback Adventure - Day 9 - Yellow River Billabong

Kakadu - Yellow River Billabong

When the alarm goes off at 5:30 I am already awake. We are both sticky, grumpy and tired. The temperature never went below 30 degrees C. We had planned to spend another night in our idyllic campsite, but with unspoken agreement we just pack up everything in record time - whilst trying to ignore the mozzies.

We hit the road at 6:00 in darkness. Rendezvous with the boat for a cruise on the Yellow River Billabong at 6:25.

Pre dawn on the water.

First light of dawn

Dawn's pinks and blues reflecting off the water.

We are on the Billabong by sunrise. Beautiful pink and turquoise light reflecting off the calm water surface. Birds calling to each other. Crocodiles waking up to catch the first warm rays of the sun.

A billabong is a bend in the river that has been cut off from the main channel by receding water levels. Another clue to the words of that Aussie anthem, Waltzing Matilda. It becomes a self contained ecosystem and a haven for birds, fish, frogs, crocodiles, snakes and spiders as the waters recede.

During the Wet, the water level rises by 8-12 m, engulfing everything in its wake. Now, at the beginning of the Dry, waters have receded somewhat. The waterlilies are in bloom and the birds are just starting to return from to the newly dry trees.

A pair of Rainbow Bee-eaters

Jabiru Storks doing a mating dance.

Our guide is a local and tries to be funny: "You may have noticed the life vests. They are almost completely useless." He is technically correct, since these are crocodile infested waters, but I am suffering from a serious sense of humour failure at the moment.

Our guide quite clearly has a thing for crocs - he spots them in no time and spends a lot of time telling us about them. We see several "salties", some sunning themselves with open mouths, some swimming. No "freshies" about today. Freshies apparently won't go for humans - not that I'm going to test that theory.

A Salty giving us the eye

This one has survived a fight.

One fantastic sight of the day is a fish eagle taking off from its perch, diving down to the surface and pulling a fish out of the water with its claws. You only see this stuff in the movies. Luckily our guide knows his birds as well as the crocs. We have lots of questions.

A White Bellied Sea-Eagle

The sun is now well up and with the sun comes the heat and the mosquitoes - although they are not quite as bad as the night before.

At 8:45 we moor up again. I am usually not at my best if I am hungry, sweaty or tired. Today I am all 3. We decide to find food as soon as possible. This is achieved at the Cooinda resort, where we both do a buffet breakfast, coffee and juice.

After more coffee and juice we decide that this is no way to live. Clearly, camping in a tent in the Top End is a pastime best practiced by the locals, or people who think that 35 degrees C is 'cool'. Our enquiries have also shown that almost all of the more interesting parts (read - where I can make use of my hired Land Cruiser's 4x4 capabilities) of Kakadu is still closed due to impassable roads after the Wet. Is is also clear that our information about mosquitoes not being a problem early in the Dry is completely wrong.

We tally our mosquito bites and I count 95 on my arms and legs. We get to over a hundred on one of Eli's legs, and then stopped counting! We both look as if we a suffering from chickenpox.

At this stage, camping in Kakadu holds very little charm and we decide to find air conditioned, mosquito proof lodgings for the night. It is Easter Weekend, and the whole of Kakadu is booked out. Eli exhausts all the hotels and other options in Kakadu and eventually finds an air conditioned, mozzie free, budget room at Point Stuart in the Mary River National Park, 300 km's away.

First stop, however, is the World Heritage Site of Ubirr....