ONE NEWS (Auckland, New Zealand) 12 December 05 Up close and personal with crocs
Encountering a crocodile in the wild is an awesome if unsettling experience, and one that's alarmingly easy to come by during a trip to Australia's Top End.
You can see plenty of crocs from arm's length on an organised boat trip, or you can drive out to one of Kakadu's many croc-inhabited rivers and spot them on your own (signs advise you to say back from the water's edge).
Alternately, you can visit one of the Territory's crocodile farms, which give you lots of opportunity to see some really massive specimens up close but from behind the safety of a fence.
The 2002 taking of a tourist by a salt water crocodile, (or "saltie" from Kakadu's Sandy Billagong came three years before local researchers confirmed a NT croc boom.
There are currently 85,000 saltwater crocodiles in the NT. In 1972, before they were protected, there were only 3,000.
Salties are distinct from the less dangerous freshwater crocodiles (or "freshies", which also abound.
While freshies can bite if provoked, they generally keep to themselves and unlike salties, don't consider people as dinner.
Statistics also show a 30-fold increase in attacks on humans by salties in the last 30 years. Three people have been attacked on average each year since 2001.
This compares with one attack every ten years during the 1970s.
Despite this, or perhaps because of it, crocodiles remain one of the Territory's biggest fascinations. With this in mind, I set off to see the great Aussie croc.
It didn't take me long.
"2.7m croc closes popular swim spot!" declares page three of the Northern Territory News when I arrived in Darwin.
A film crew was also in the area shooting Rogue, a movie about a crocodile that terrorizes a boat of tourists, the News reported - it's billed as the biggest thing for the Territory since Crocodile Dundee.
I headed for Kakadu National Park, 22,000 square hectares of Aboriginal-owned wilderness and also the traditional home of the saltie.
Stories reflect how crocodiles featured in the lives of the traditional owners.
One tells how two sisters were repeatedly warned by their parents not to swim in a crocodile infested billabong. But the girls ignored their parents - so as punishment they were turned into crocodiles.
On the road to Kakadu we passed a billboard sign advertising a "jumping crocodile" cruise on the Adelaide River. They weren't going out for another couple of hours so we backtracked a few hundred metres down the road to a second jumping crocs operation.
For around $30 per person you're taken on a one-hour cruise along the muddy Adelaide river, home to 2,000 salties.
During the trip crew members dangle hunks of meat above the water from the side of the boat, and you get to see the crocs leap out of the water and snap up the meat.
The Lonely Planet guide to the Territory describes this as a bit of a circus, which it is, but it does allow you to get spectacularly close up.
The crew seemed to recognise every crocodile immediately and fondly referred to them by name. We were introduced to Tannin, Pattern Face and Gremlin.
Michael Jackson, we were told, didn't feel like coming out on this day!
We saw about six crocs during the hour, including a few cute babies. Our guide told us one of the reasons crocodile numbers were increasing so rapidly was because many of the larger males were hunted out during pre-protection days.
Normally the big crocs performed a natural cull by killing and cannibalising the smaller ones.
Back on the road and driving through Kakadu, the crocodile safety signs proliferate.
"Danger! Crocodiles inhabit this area! Attacks cause injury or death!"
"Keep away from the water's edge! Do not enter the water!"
"Take extreme care when launching and retrieving boats!"
We drove on to Cahill's Crossing at the East Alligator River which runs close to the escarpment marking the border with Arnhem Land.
The river, misnamed by an early explorer who didn't know his crocodiles from his alligators, was a murky yellow colour like the Adelaide River.
My companions swore they saw a crocodile emerge downriver but I was feeling a little uneasy about being too close to the water. I returned to the car, remembering the words of a local who warned, "It's the croc you don't see that you worry about, not the one you do."
The next crocodile moment came courtesy of a an organised early morning cruise on the Yellow Waters Billabong at Cooinda in Kakadu.
Cruises start all day but we opted for an early morning one, which were told is when there's likely to be a lot of croc action.
Unlike the jumping crocs tour, this one didn't offer any bells and whistles, except for an abundance of undisturbed crocs in their natural habitat.
As soon as the boat moved up, a 2m-long saltie named Pluto mades an appearance.
We saw about another 12 crocs on our trip up and down the billabong and passed a crocodile trap, a long, wire structure normally baited with a pig's head or a chicken.
By now we'd come to recognise the tell-tale slide marks on muddy banks, as well as the tiny bubbles rising ominously from under the water - a sure sign that a crocodile lurks beneath.
"If you're in the water and you ever see bubbles like that you panic," our guide joked.
Later, we visited Crocodylus Park in Darwin, a research and conservation centre which is open to visitors and offers feeding time tours.
Here you'll see real monsters, some battle-scarred and missing limbs.
The adult crocs are kept in breeding pens and babies are sent to nurseries of up to 500.
The park also has a very informative and interesting crocodile museum with all sorts of artifacts and documentation, including a rather horrific picture of the body of an eight-year old boy being pulled from a crocodile's cut-open stomach.
So what do you do after a week of croc watching? You get your own back and have a crocodile burger. Unfortunately when we went to order one we're told the burgers were sold out.
But for the record, we were assured that we were not missing out on much.
Up close and personal with crocs