23rd November (Wed)

In the morning we walked to the Bowali Visitor Centre across a 2km stretch of savanna cover with lots of grasshoppers along the way and quite a few mosquitoes. The main reason for the visit was to pick up passes for the Kakadu National Park. Whilst at the Centre we managed to acquire some mosquito repellent spray from the girl behind the desk, although it was a DEET based repellent. However, the shop at the same visitor centre sold a repellent that uses natural ingredients, which we bought since DEET has an adverse effect on plastic watch straps.

In the afternoon we drove about 40km down to the Cooinda Lodge along the Kakadu Highway to catch a two hour Yellow Water Cruise.  

Rain Storm seen in the distance from the Yellow Water

On the cruise we saw plenty of crocodiles and eagles, a few Jabiru plus many other birds including a king fisher, a yellow tree snake and wallabies.

Lurking crocodile

Jabiru (Black-necked stork)

Kingfisher

The trip didn’t finish until around 6:30pm, nearly sunset, so with a 40km drive back to Jabiru we lost no time to take to the road. It soon got dark and my worry was that we would be liable to hit a wallaby on the journey doing serious damage to the car – fortunately we got back without incident.