Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder.

Coming to you from the Yellow Water Cruise in Cacadoo National Park in Australia's Northern Territory.

I'm on a boat trip with a number of other people looking at the remarkable wildlife here. There's I think a whistling kite circling

overhead. These are impressive creatures which if accounts are correct, a natural fire that might

have been started by lightning. They will pick up a burning twig and carry it to a bit of the woodland which isn't

burning in order to start a fire in order to chase out the creatures on which it feeds so nature's

arsonists i guess but a lot of people are here for one reason and that is to see the apex predator top of the food

chain for the past hundred years and that is the crocodile of course the saltwater crocodile even

though we are hundreds of kilometers from the sea they are pretty fierce creatures. I can't see any on the banks

right now, but I've probably seen two dozen in the past hour. They lie there most of the time,

but their jaws open. That's not because they're just waiting for some foods to arrive,

but it helps to regulate their body temperature.

The flora is so impressive too.

There are lotus lilies.

Now, they are interesting because the pods of seeds are edible.

People from the local community, the aboriginals who look after this part of Kakadu National Park, are allowed to pluck them from the lilies and they will take out the seeds

which are very, very tasty. Apparently they have quite a laxative effect so you

really don't want to have too many of them and then this vast sky heavy with clouds and the threat of

impending rain because we're on the verge of the tropical summer right now

which means it's going to get very wet and actually looking across I can see on the paper bark trees

a meter or so above ground you can see the high water mark once the land starts flooding.

Just drifting across a bilibon which is a trapped body of water where the river system has gone away

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