Parents Day 14

Thursday

Weary from yesterday, we woke up slowly and mooched around the house. The sun was poking in and out of clouds and there was a bit of a cool breeze. Mom and I went for a swim in the pool, and then sat outside and read while Dad napped, inside. Then we all went for a walk up the beach towards the estuary. Sounds innocent, right?

WRONG. At this point Mom finally decided to inform us, rather smugly, that she had seen a big “Danger: crocodiles” sign on the beach (“you two didn’t see it? It was huge…”). Dad then observed that most crocodiles live around estuaries or the mouths of rivers. Suddenly I was alone on the beach. Mom and Dad were sprinting in what I considered entirely the wrong direction—TOWARD the estuary. I immediately deduced that they were planning to use their bodies, or perhaps mine, as bait to lure the crocs out far enough to take photos. Needless to say, I followed a very far distance behind.

I managed to get Mom to stand with me (thanks Mom) in the middle of the beach, in a little triangle of safety, surrounded by water on three sides. A hundred metres ahead of us, Dad had the binoculars up to his eyes, cursing with excitement as he took a dozen photos of the massive crocodile on the far bank. Actually, it was a log. Then we saw an utterly clueless girl, listening to her headphones, wandering aimlessly along the beach WITHIN TEN FEET OF TOOTHY DEATH. We braced nervously for her to be taken. I trained my camera on her.

Obviously, nothing happened and it was with a tiny sense of disappointment that we wandered back. We were all hungry, so we hopped a bus up to the beach north of us, called Yorkey’s Knob. Aussies and their sense of humor.

At the Knob we enjoyed perhaps the best scenery we’ve seen yet.

It was a very tiny town, with one or two vacation beach houses and a few permanent resident homes, set in among the biggest strangler figs and mangroves and Spanish moss and palm trees and, gosh, mom and dad can tell you all the names of the dozens of ferns we saw, but all in all it was just amazingly beautiful. We went for late lunch at the Yacht Club. Unfortunately, it being a yacht club, it was on the water and so Mom and Dad tempted fate FOR THE SECOND TIME, walking with glazed eyes closer and closer and obviously yearning to see that tiny ripple of movement that means you are going to meet your Maker in the stomach of a fifteen-foot dinosaur. I stood in the middle of the road about twenty feet behind them and shouted dire warnings about how bad they were going to feel if I got eaten by a crocodile. Seriously, in all the stories, or according to Bill Bryson anyway, the victim is just carelessly walking along the water's edge picking up pretty shells when suddenly she’s gone, and the witnesses see her maybe pop up a second later looking confused (probably because her legs just got bitten off at the waist) and then she vanishes again in the churning water and next day the locals have to organize a search party to find the crocodile, cut it open, extract the person for a proper burial, and then...they send the crocodile to live on a farm with the other bad crocodiles. Yes, that's correct. They don't kill the crocodiles, they send them to some sort of convent for reformed people-eaters

Anyway, somehow, we all cheated death again. Early bed. Here is a log we were convinced was a croc.