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I slept well, although apparently Garth told off one of the guys in our room for slamming the door whilst were asleep! My throat was really swollen - maybe from smorkling and swallowing so much sea water? After breakfast we headed off to Hartley's Crocodile Adventures which is 20 mins south of Port Douglas along the beautiful costal road.
We missed the Cassowary feeding but went straight to the Crocodile Farm Tour. This probably sounds stupid but I'd never really thought of farming crocodiles for their skin! They take the eggs from the crocodile nests and they have to mark the tops of the to keep them the right way up. This is because the baby hangs down off an umbilical cord from the top of the egg and feeds on the yoke at the bottom for the 80 days that it is in the egg. They incubate eggs at 32 degrees as this makes more male babies which is preferable. Lower temperatures produce females. Males are preferable as they grow faster and therefore produce more skin, quicker. There is no way of telling male and female apart from the outside, as everything is tucked away for maximum streamlining and protection underwater. The guide took us to a pen where they had probably 100 baby crocodiles all about 1 meet long. If there were half the amount in there a predominant male would attack the others for control, but the current amount is too many for a predominant male to fight, so they'll just get on with it. This is important because all the designer handbags need to be perfect and not have holes in from fighting! Apparently a crocodile skin designer handbag starts at €60,000! The scales have to be 1cm square for a perfect handbag! All the parts of the crocodile are used; there is only 3kg of meat at the top of the tail, the head and feet are used for tourism, the soft tummy for designer bags, and any other unused part is ground down for fertiliser. When they 'harvest' the crocodiles they shoot them in the head, but they have to be shot from under their jaw because the tops of them are rock solid from millions if years of evolution. I kind of felt sorry for the baby crocodiles who were destined to be handbags for the elite and chosen (not the rich - crocodile leather hand bags are such a commodity that money cannot buy them - just the invited!) But our guide went on to tell us how crocodiles have survived millions of years, only nearly to be brought to the brink of extinction in the 60's due to poaching. Poachers used to hunt in the wild (which was dangerous and took a long time) and take the heads and skin and leave the rest to rot as they couldn't carry the body. However, farms preserve and protect crocodiles and have allowed them to discover more about the species; such as they estimate that crocodiles can live 80-90 years but in the next 100 years, by farming, they will be able to give a very accurate life expectancy. The whole thing was very interesting. The guide took out a baby croc which had its jaw bound up (a legal requirement in Australia) where he showed us around its anatomy and let a few kids touch it it!
The rain was starting to get heavy and was getting hard to take photos with our camera without getting it wet! We then went over tithe Boat Cruise where I had to ask a big group of people to move up so the rest of us could take shelter from the rain....reminded me of bloody London trains!!! We got on this boat and the first thing our guide said was 'crocodiles can jump their body length out of the water - which means they can get into this boat if they want to, or even lift this boat off the water...so here is a walkie-talkie to radio for help if I get eaten' and he threw the radio to an older guy a the back of the boat!! (Wasn't sure if he was joking or not) So we went for a casual boat trip around this beautiful billabong in the rain, filled with saltwater crocodiles. Apparently saltwater crocs (salties) are the ones that eat humans - fresh water eat meat, but not humans. There were plenty to see and we even saw a few nest as they were at the end of the mating season. The guide stopped the boat and put a chicken head and then a chicken wing onto a stick to coax the crocs out of the water for a few photos - which he did, but i was shocked at the huge difference between those lethargic animals chilling in the water and the huge beasts jumping out of the water at the food much quicker than a human can respond!! It was a bit annoying that the boat had glass all around but it felt safe!
We then went to the crocodile feeding show. It was seriously pouring down with rain at this point and was quite uncomfortable. The park provided free umbrellas, but they were all taken, so garth spend money on a new yellow poncho (why did we throw our South American red ponchos away!?!???!??). At the feeding, the sheltered sating was rammed and we managed to get a seat the the front whist balancing over a few buggies, but late arrivals blocked our view by standing right a the front. Even when I asked this obese American guy to sit down so everyone could see, he said it was too wet to sit down (I don't know if he thought we were sitting on dry seats - but we sure weren't!) so visibility was certainly challenging! The guide was excellent (despite the torrential rain, which I'm not sure they were used to catering for) and gave great detail into the history and habits of the crocodiles. The explained how they were designed for the edge of water attacks and its there that they need to be respected, but on land, they are large and heavy with small legs and a large tail to drag, and therefore, if you are chased by a salty, it's easy to outrun them on land. He said they rarely attack from water to land because if they do it too often it's too predictable and they won't get an prey, so they often spend a long time waiting for the perfect moment and achieve almost 100% results, even though it a rare occurrence. The show was made more interesting by having a large Australian and American audience who asked a lot of interesting questions. The guide then fed the animals, who were clearly expecting it and he held his hand rather too far over the fence for my liking!!
We then moved around to the next billabong where the fresh water crocs were and they were visably smaller than the salties. They fed them in the actual pen without fences which showed that they are not interested in humans.
The show finished and we took a walk around the park. It was still heavily raining. We saw a number of tropical birds and even heard a kuchoborgh XXXX laugh a few times, which i loved! We tried to see the turtles but they were hiding. We saw Wallabies and Koala's and even another Cassowary through a fence. The rain was just silly by then, so seeing e Quolls, Emus and Snakes/lizards was rather lost on me. I was almost soaked through by this point and we stopped a the show ground for our packed lunch in the empty arena. I wanted to have a photograph with a baby crocodile (i had even put on my makeup for this) but it cost $18, so i didn't co it :( We then made our way to the restaurant and shop area to dry off when I discovered my phone had got quite wet in the rain through my pocket. The light/flash was constantly on and the camera was all misted up :( I tried to dry it under the hand dyer but it was not happy. It was only 1pm and we had an hours wait until the snake show and 2 hours until the crocodile attack show (the main event) but we decided it would be best to go home as we were both wet and cold and my phone wasn't happy.
At Port Douglas we drove past the beach and up to the view point to show Garth. I got some post cards and stamps and got some sausages for dinner at Coles. At the hostel we researched more of our trip, ate dinner, I then had a panic about my phone and rushed out and bought some rice to leave my phone in overnight in the hope the rice would absorb the rain water and then we chilled.
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