Cooinda - Gagudju

Waters, the dominant male croc(3.5 to 4m) near the jetty at Yellow Waters.

Our first stay in Kakadu (Gagudju) was at Cooinda, near the beautiful Yellow Waters.  Two spectacular wildlife filled cruises made me crave a better lens for our camera even more!!

Cooinda campground itself had plenty of red dust but a lovely pool area.  Like all the other pools, so far in the Top End so far, it was freezing!  The kids go in hot and come out blue.  I find that hard to understand! How come the pools don't reach a comfortable ambient temperature when it gets so warm during the days? Anyway this one was similar. I dived in, swam to the other side, milled about in the waterfall for about 3 minutes with Dom and then needed to lie on the rocks by the pool to warm up!! Paul was much better able to stay the distance!

Paul - with limpets

The first cruise was at Sunset.  We were excited to go as Sascha, Isaac and I had done a walk down there in the morning, and spotted a sweet little Azure Kingfisher and seen how beautiful it was.  Paul had spotted a croc on his walk!

So the evening cruise: plenty of birds (our new birds list shows significant enhancement!); plenty of crocs (one caught a barra for dinner, another chased an intruder out of her territory); and a spectacular sunset.  We went to bed as early as possible after dinner and prepared for an early start the next day where we got more of the same but a sunrise and mist over the water, and a croc eating a file snake, instead!  It was cold and we were very hungry on arrival back to Cooinda.  We sure enjoyed our buffet breakfast to the max that morning.  No lunch required that day,  thats for sure!!