Darwin, Australia 4-3-09

Arrived early and watched the sun come up over Darwin. Had an early morning tour planned. Museums and crocs, sounded good to us. The temperature was like a sunny hot, humid day in July in Alabama. The shade of a tree was a welcome sight. Light colored clothing was the optimum choice for sure, although some in our group did not heed the weather forecast! Sweaty good fun was what we had. Saw a lot, learned a lot and screamed a lot...Happy that the engineers that built the bridge that we all stood on, that was only 2-3 feet above several hundred fully grown crocs, had done a great job in making sure it was completely sound!!!! Enjoy our day...
































In 1974, Darwin was hit by Cyclone Tracy. It was Christmas Eve. This date has become the benchmark of time for the people of this area. Looking at photographs in museums here today, you could not help but think about the victims of hurricane Katrina. People lost everything, The aerial photos we saw showed before and after and it was a complete devastation to this town. It is remarkable that the people of this area stayed and rebuilt this city. We saw old newspaper clippings that said 80-200 people died. Not sure the numbers are right but looking at all the devastation, it would seem that thousands could have died.
Everything here is basically about 35 years old. The parks, trees replanted, the homes, the buildings, the schools....all had to be rebuilt. Darwin today has 120,000 people living there.

We spent the day touring the city, going to their museums and their WILDLIFE park!!! CROCS!!! The research center we went to was called The Crocodylus Park. They have many baby crocs and many full grown crocs that they breed and conduct research with. The whole idea of being that close to these monsters was just nuts really. These are salt water crocs. They are huge! Some of the ones we "fed" weighed 400-500 pounds and were 15 ft. long. Some had "faces" that looked to be about 2 and a half feet maybe more wide. Salt water crocs can lunge up and at you. They can go vertically and horizontally. They are fast creatures. The way they jump up is nothing short of nightmarish when they are going after a hunk of meat! The sound that their jaws make when they slam shut onto a piece of food, whether it be a chicken leg or a whole chicken, is a sound that you really never want to hear. If you can think back to when cars did not have automatic trunk closures and you had to manually slam your trunk closed on your big tank of a car Oldsmobile or the like, that metal slamming onto metal and amplify that about 50 times and the rate of force about 1,000 times and that would be the horrible sound their jaws make when they "attack" the food! It was enough for me to have nightmares over it. The local paper yesterday had huge headlines "Croc Bait" in Darwin. Seems there were some fishermen that had waded into the water to fish or what seemed to look like get a line freed and also in the phot was a big croc swimming about 20 yards from them! The person that took the photo went on to say that this area where they were fishing had 353 "salties" in it!!! I guess "salties" is the local word for "man eating monster crocs"!!!
We survived it all and lived to talk about it...

A visit to their museum of natural history brought us face to face with all the monsters we had been warned about! The snakes, the spiders, the jellyfish and the crocs!!

We also toured their aviation museum. Did anyone really know how large those B-52 bombers were in WWII?? The tires are so large, they were about Nicky's height and I really can't come close to describing how wide the plane is wing tip to wing tip but a stab guess would be about as wide as a football field or more! This B-52 bomber is on permanent loan from the US and is they only one not on US soil.