Sunrise with crocodiles

This morning was a super early start for anyone that is on holiday. We needed to be at Cooinda by 6:30am for our sunrise tour in Yellow River, which happened to be 40 minutes away.  

Getting on a boat in a crocodile infested river just as daylight started (but still no sign of the sun) is an experience in itself. 

We motored slowly down, spotting and talking about all the birds and wildlife, with a keen interest on the Kings of the river system. 

Seeing the sun rise over the boggy marshes was incredible too, with many different shades of orange starting to reflect off the water. 

Before we knew it, our time was up and we were back on dry land. The good part of this was that we got a full buffet breakfast at the lodge as part of the ticket price. 

As we were about to embark on a huge walk, mountain climb and swim, we did the right thing and gorged ourselves until we were about to burst. 

We waddled back to the car and headed for Jim Jim falls. This is reached by travelling 55km on a reasonably good dirt road, followed by a further 30ish km on a 4wd single lane track. This was the moment I had been waiting for. Time to get Jerry dirty. I let the tyre pressure down and went forth. It wasn’t terribly difficult but had a lot of high spots, sand, rock and shallow creeks to cross. It was fun and the kids were excited about the bumps and wet bits. 

We couldn’t believe how many people were at the end of the track in the car park. There must have been at least 50 cars. 

The track along the creeks edge was difficult and of course horribly hot. We finally got to the end and....... no waterfall. 

Many words and phrases were muttered. We later found out it had dried up about 2 weeks ago. We were so hot and sweaty at this stage that we didn’t really care. We jumped into the rock pool and cooled down for the next hour. 

This definitely wasn’t as nice as some of the others, and nowhere has been as nice as Litchfield (in my opinion), but it was cool and refreshing. 

We hiked back to the car and got ourselves all sweaty again, had lunch that was still beautifully cool thanks to some ice packs in s thermal bag, despite the 60 degree temperature of the car, then returned on the 4wd track back to civilisation. 

A long day that had been filled with heaps of adventure, saw the kids and Tracy all asleep in the car on the way back, and then an hour relaxing in the caravan park pool when we got back 

We must be due for a rest day soon.