jumping crocodiles

Dear friends,

taking a little detour off the Anahem Hwy into Kakadu national park the jumping crocodile tour was highly recommended to the day before while swimming in the Florence Falls' pools with two young Canadian and Australian physicians who had done it themselves.
Beating our rental car up on the dusty unsealed gravel, we woke up some birds. At the place itself, we started with Snake and Coffee, like the last post shows.
But on the boat the real experience started: Barely 15 m away from the jetty "big papa croc" was lazyly dozing away in the murky waters. He knew the boat and my first suspicion of him being tied to some tree nearby proofed false, when he was the first to jump out at the bait. His big jaw is on the top left. Sadly my skills in motion picture taking were not as developed to bring you the 6m crock half way out of the water, but the second picture on top is still impressive I believe. The last reptile is missing one of his front arms. "That's what they do to each other" the captain explained upon me sharing this photo with him. "Imaging what they can do to you. And still, there are people out there swimming!" The trick to survive, because you and me would probably die due to the heavy blod loss, is to shut the blood flow to the extremity in danger directly. As the crocodile has had roughly 200 million years (hmmm that even sounds to much for my likings, but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crocodile has just confirmed it) to adapt, I guess we have to give it some credit for a job well done.

Hope to be able to say the same about my cooking that I am about to start,

Cheers,

Mat