Vikings in Australia - Víkingar í Ástralíu

10^th September

We woke up late and went to the pub to check on breakfast. Alas, no breakfast to be had at the pub. The owner apologised and told us he didn’t have a cook this morning, so he advised us to go to a local café. We headed there and had a great breakfast. I downloaded Skype onto my Samsung Android phone and we used it to have a quick chat with Sibbas brother in Iceland. Then we headed out to the five rivers lookout, which is just behind and above Wyndham. Once we got to the top we could see in all directions. Wyndham is located at the Cambridge Gulf. Five large rivers that mostly flow during the wet season empty into the Cambridge Gulf. It must be quite a sight to see them in full steam! However during winter they are pretty much empty or only a trickle flow through.

From the lookout we headed to the Wyndham Crocodile farm. This is where they breed and raise salt water crocodiles, so they can sell the skin to France. The crocs are kept until they are two years old or approximately one meter in length and then sold off. The fashion industry has a huge preference for the croc skin from northern Australia as it is much easier to work with and has more colour than other croc skins. We went on a croc feeding tour with the manager. He fetched a trolley with lots of beef meat pieces and bones and then went around the different cages to throw the crocs a piece. It was very interesting to say the least! These crocs can get very big and they are powerful. Although penned in, he told us they could easily jump and leave whenever they wanted, they are so powerful and agile when they want to be. Their oldest crock had recently died and it had reached the ripe old age of 98. One of the male Crocs had been captured at Chamberlaine gorge. It had been harassing the boats on the water, so El Questro asked for it to be removed. Thus it was captured and moved to the Croc farm. Just as well for us, we sailed on Chamberlaine Gorge!! We also saw the crock pen, where they raise the hatched eggs. In there the manager showed us a white crock. They are very rare, only 1 in a 100,000 births. Thus they are very much an item!

The manager told us a lot of information and facts about Crocs. Enough to get a lot of respect for these dinosaurs!

From the Croc farm we stopped at the Wyndham historical museum, just to look around and see some old stuff. We also stopped at a park with some Aboriginal statues about dreaming. Very big statues, taller than me!

From there we headed to Kununarra. We did stop at the Grotto, which is a small gorge, just off the road between Wyndham and Kununarra. There is a stair down into the gorge, that has been created. It’s only 140 steps down to the gorge floor, so not that hard to enter it. However there are no rails, so if you lose your footing, you could fly down! As there was very little water in the gorge, we decided not to walk down.

As we approached Kununarra, we could see that the bushfires were still on the rampage. The main road was open so we had no problems heading into Kununarra, but we were told at the visitor centre that some other roads around town were closed. We decided to camp for a few nights at a caravan park, that is close to a large open lake that is on the Ord rive and close to town. We set up camp, but also booked a flight over Lake Argyle and the Bungle Bungles. Thus that is where we are going tomorrow morning.