We were up at 5:30am this morning to go on the Yellow Water billabong sunrise cruise. The cruise went for 2 hours and winds its way through the yellow water billabong and south alligator river. It was a pretty sunrise over the billabong and there was a lot of smoke (from the fires in the national park) and fog to add to the ambience.

It was such a great cruise and we saw so much wildlife including, 2 male saltie's around 4.2 metres, lots of female salties around 2-3 metres, brolga's, jabiru (black necked stork), azure kingfisher, sacred kingfisher, nankeen night heron, eastern great egrets, Australasian darter male (black) and female (white breasted), white bellied sea eagle, kites (whistling), whistling ducks, pelicans, pied heron, little pied cormorant, comb crested jacana, royal spoonbills, 3 water buffalo's and brumby's.

The highlight of the cruise was watching the male croc swimming right along next to our boat.

Following the cruise we went back to the Gagudju Lodge Cooinda for a full buffet breakfast and a swim in the resort pool.

When we were driving back to our campsite at Mardugal (near Cooinda) we saw a dingo, which was very coincidental as Rog heard one howling last night. We left our campsite and headed to Jabiru for a quick stop at the bakery to get some more bread then continued on to Merl campsite (near Ubirr). The campsites at Merl are a lot smaller than the other two campsites we have stayed at so after a bit of manoeuvring and a change of campsites a few times we finally found a suitable spot. Luckily Rog is very good at reversing the caravan seeing as though his navigator didn't do a very good job finding a suitable site.

We had lunch and a laze around the caravan then drove to Cahill's Crossing. It's the water crossing between Kakadu to Arnhem Land. You can only go across into Arnhem Land if you have a permit (there were lots of cars driving in and out) so we didn't go across the water but went to the picnic area and then the viewing platform which overlooks the east alligator river. There were about 6 large saltie's swimming around and one ate a fish on the bank. As we were walking to the viewing platform I was busy looking at 3 kingfishers in the tree and Rog was lucky enough to see one of the croc's go onto the road crossing then go back into the water.

Unfortunately as we arrived in the carpark all the cars were leaving as the best viewing time is about an hour before high tide (and we didn't know what time high tide was) when the fish are going over the crossing and the crocs all come in for a feeding frenzy. There were about 50 crocs there and the aboriginals sitting on the river bank were pulling in heaps of fish too apparently.

We drove to Ubirr to see several aboriginal rock art sites and climbed up the rocky lookout which has spectacular 360 degree views over the Nadab floodplain and Arnhem Land. We stayed to watch the beautiful sunset then headed back to our campsite.

Once the kids were asleep Rog & I went and watched a crocodile slideshow in the campgrounds which was really interesting. We had to put on the bushmans as the mozzies are bad here but not as bad as Cape Keraudren.