Third Weird Thing

Ok, the third weird thing about me is my irrational fear of crocodiles. Now that I think about it it's probably quite a rational fear. I know Steve Irwin used to think they were nice, and cute, and adorable and worth saving. Bugger that.

Apart from the endless recurring nightmares I used to have about crocodiles, me and my crocodile homies have some history.

You're probably all tired of me mentioning that I'm from the Northern Territory of Australia. I'm tired of me mentioning it. However, besides me mentioning it endlessly, it was actually a fairly interesting place to grow up. My parents were camping and fishing folk, much to my chagrin. I'm more of the sleeping, movie-going, reading folk myself.

We often when to Kakadu National Park before it was a National Park, and before it became a tourist mecca. We used to fish for barramundi at a place called Yellow Waters, which is now a real tourist mecca, but used to be just a great place to fish. See photo. Nice huh?

So moving right along. You'll have to forgive my over-use of measurements in the following paragraph. I'm trying to give you some perspective of size (and frighten the bejesus out of you at the same time). My apologies for the imperialists out there - I tend to think in Metric these days. Although I'm 5'3" tall. Don't ask me what that it is centimetres. But I digress....

One day we were fishing at this lovely spot in a 6 metre long aluminium dinghy (aka dodgy tin can). When out of the corner of my eye I saw a 5 metre long (16 foot) crocodile hurl itself out of the water and drag a full-grown 1000kg water buffalo by the neck into the water, never to be seen again (after a bit of splashing and kicking). At the time I was about 20 metres (65.6167979 feet) away from where the buffalo used to stand. Gulp.

THEN, when I was a bit older, I took my sweet English penfriend on the Jumping Crocodile Cruise. The photo at the top of this post is one of the crocodiles that they tempt to jump up and bite chicken carcasses off sticks. All was going well, we were enjoying the little sweet croccies jumping up etc etc la la la gaiety and fun.

By the way, we were sitting on the lower deck of a boat with glass sides, and right against the window. The commentator then announced that we were in for a special 'treat" today, because Molokai, the king crocodile of this part of the river was heading towards the boat. We craned our necks to get a view and couldn't really see anything but swirling water. right.next.to.where.we.were.sitting. Then this massive crocodile (about 7 metres long) propels itself straight out of the water with nothing separating us except a pane of glass. I could see green muck on his four-inch long teeth. I could not have put my arms around the girth of its head, let alone its body. I could have smelled its breath if I had not felt all the blood drain out of my face and take all the strength inside me not to faint.

The rest of the Jumping Croc Cruise was not as la la la gaiety or fun. We tried not to think about what would happen if the boat capsized into the brown murky river. We tried not to think about having a massive coronary seizure before your skin even touched the water from pure, unadulterated terror.

I'll also refer you to a previous post where I once did some croc flirting with another friend.

Enough said I hope.