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It was hot and humid today with rain visible in the distance as we arrived at the Darwin Cruise Ship Terminal about noon. The ship will be port side for the next 30 hours as we enjoy an overnight stay in Darwin.
Today we survived attacks by “jumping crocodiles” on the Adelaide River. Before you get worried, you should know that it was much more of a challenge for the beef steaks, chicken halves and bones that were used as bait to lure the 6-16 foot estuary crocodiles to our boat and get them to jump 6 feet out of the water! But, I’ve gotten ahead of myself…
Click here for detailed Darwin Photo Gallery.
I was (Dale) back to normal today with no fever so we were on for the “Jumping Crocodile” tour at 1:30 pm. We had breakfast in the room, worked on pictures and blog posts and then headed out in the sweltering heat and humidity with my fogged up D700 and several bottles of water. The comfortable bus was air conditioned, although there were complaints that it was either too cold or too hot. But who’s complaining when it’s over 90 outside, about 100% humidity with off and on rain and there are crocodiles everywhere?
The tour guide had a strong French accent as he gave us background on Darwin, Australia’s fastest growing city. One of the more interesting facts is that Darwin is highly multi-cultural. This diversity occurred when workers who came to help rebuild the city, ended up staying here. Darwin has been rebuilt multiples times including after WWII and also after being hit by major cyclones multiple times. Cyclone Tracy hit Darwin in 1974 and knocked out 70% of the buildings.
Also, the busy pearling industry has attracted Asians since the turn of the century. About 40% of the population is Asian. There is also a high percentage of Aboriginals who own close to 50% of the land here. When you look at the geography and the proximity to Indonesia and Asia, it is also easy to see how this became a major melting pot.
While Australia’s Northwest Territory is immense there are only three large cities in the entire place and Darwin is by far the largest. The suburbs here are growing very fast and property has become surprisingly expensive, on the order of $750,000 for a decent size home in the more desirable bedroom communities. This is partly because there isn’t much buildable land near Darwin proper because much of the place floods during the rainy season (which is happening right now). Large-scale flooding is common and the large highways often become impassable for days, weeks and even months, causing detours of over 200 miles to get form point A to point B!
The more the guide talked about the area the more we decided that this wasn’t a place for us! The reason so many people move here is because there is virtually no unemployment due to the mining, pearling, fishing and, of course, construction industries. They can’t get people here and build housing for them fast enough! Still, I think we’ll pass on Darwin.
On the way to the croc tour we passed their savanna land, lush, green and wet with lots of mangos, eucalyptus trees and tall grass. You don’t want to go walking or swimming around these parts because there are estuary crocs everywhere. These saltwater crocs are the most dangerous and will eat anything, including people without thinking twice. Freshwater crocs, not so much…they are smaller and will run from people…but who’s going to be checking which type of croc it is! Just stay out of the water if you are in Northern Australia and climb a tree as fast as you can if a croc is chasing you!
One interesting thing that the locals eventually learned from the Aboriginals is to burn the grass growing between all the trees every year when it starts drying out. We could see the black marks up to about 20 feet on all the trees. If they didn’t do this they would eventually have devastating fires that would destroy everything. Think Southern California. The Aboriginals have done this for tens of thousands of years and they have now decided that this is the correct method and follow it religiously.
The pictures show the story of the croc feeding boat ride. As advertised, the crocs, well-trained from many feedings, approach the boat slowly. They would show up, one at a time, and the woman on the top deck of the boat would place the meat on a rope and dangle it in front of the croc, lifting it quickly when the croc went for it. The crocs would jump six feet out of the water and eventually outsmart the dangler, grabbing the meat and then slowly float away. The large male crocs can hold their breath for up to an hour so they are really good at sneaking up on their prey. We fed eight different crocs of various sizes and sexes and got some good shots from the very crowded railings. Lots of photographers on this cruise and it was almost impossible to get a spot to shoot! Margaret took videos and I took stills with the D700 and 28-300 lens. Hope you enjoy them!
On the way back to the ship they took a slightly out of the way side-trip to a nature preserve museum/restroom stop for 15 minutes and then we did the hour drive back to the ship. One of the three Regent tour buses got a flat tire at the croc show (those nasty crocs might have gotten it) so they had to put that bus load into the other two – luckily there was enough room for everyone.
We were invited to dine with the captain tonight and we had a very nice time listening to him and the other dinner guests tell stories about their cruising adventures. After dinner we joined one of the other couples, Kathy and Paul, for an after dinner drink in the Voyager Lounge. They are involved in a ministry and strongly support an orphanage in Uganda. All in all, it was a fun day and night on-board the Voyager.
The next day we decided to pass on the harbor tour boat ride so we won’t have a review of that in a post. It was quite hot and we were making progress on our projects so we had a nice lunch in Compass Rose, our new favorite thing to do each day, and just took it easy. There was a sailboat race in the area right off the Voyager and it was fun watching them, bringing back memories when we used to race our J120 and J105. As we watched we just kept thinking what a shame it is that you can’t go in the water anywhere in these parts due to the crocs and thousands of large jellyfish that were floating by. Not good.
Sea Day tomorrow and then on to Komodo to see Komodo Dragons!
Photography Comments:
Like most days lately it started out hot and humid and ended up rainy, hot and humid with high white clouds. The lighting today was a bit harsh and, although I took a polarizing filter with me, once the crocs started jumping I forgot to give it a try. Of course, the filter only works when it is at a 90-degree angle to the sun and the boat was circling, etc. It still would have helped eliminate some of the glare on the water. Of course, it also would cause you to stop down at least one stop but that’s probably too detailed for this blog. Like when you are trying to get shots out of a fast moving bus, trying to get a jumping croc requires a decent shutter speed, on the order of 1/500th or faster. I found that faster is better so I set my ISO to 1600, my aperture to 7.1 and made sure that the shutter was at least 1,000. I could have just set the shutter to 1,000th and T/S mode but then the exposure might be too low so I chose Aperture/A mode today and it worked reasonably well.
This was one of those days where there was a LOT of photographers crowding the railings making it difficult to get a decent shooting environment. You just do the best you can while giving the others a chance to get shots. A fair number of people taking videos today and it was definitely a great video subject. It really does make me wonder what everyone does with all their long videos because it is very time consuming to edit videos (that’s why I’m so far behind on that project!) but I guess better to have it and hope you have the time someday to do something with it than not to have it at all. Margaret volunteered to shoot video from the downstairs air conditioned area with wet windows today and she got some good stuff.
Trip Summary » Travel with Dale & Margaret - […] Darwin, Australia […]