Welcome to Jabiru

And so we arrive at the township of Jabiru, the main settlement in Kakadu NP and the only place you'll find a GP or a mobil garage, should you need one.

Jabiru is mainly known for the fact that it has a hotel that's in the shape of an enormous crocodile (complete with big yellow eyes) when viewed from the air, though it's not so pleasing at ground level and they've made hardly any attempt to blend the building in with the surroundings, not even here in Kakadu, a sacred place for the aborigines.

However, we're not staying in the crocodile (at $300 per night for a basic room), we're staying in this cabin, which has an outside bathroom in a completely separate block, something that seemed pretty acceptable when I was booking it on the internet back in Sydney but came into very sharp focus when I started reading up on Kakadu and taking on the facts and figures; 10,000 different species of insects, that sort of thing. And we don't even have a torch.

This evening we made like the locals (again) and settled ourselves into the Jabiru Sports and Social Club to see what it's like to live here. It's a bit like being in the Penketh and Sankey Sports and Social Club, so I'll compare and contrast:

1. When something falls at your feet in the Penketh and Sankey club, it's definitely not a lizard (that was a bit of a shock)

2. Both clubs have toilet paper in only 50% of the cubicles

3. The PSSC doesn't have a big fence stopping the crocodiles from the local ditch climbing up the banks to bite the children (though it probably should have because it backs onto the high school, and the children coming out of there are feral)

4. Both clubs serve alcohol to the locals, though in Penketh you can also buy it at the off licence and the supermarket whereas the sale of alcohol in shops is prohibited across Kakadu because of the problem with alcoholic aborigines

5. The bar tender in the PSSC doesn't monitor how much alcohol the black people are drinking and refuse to serve them when he thinks they've got a full tank. If you're white in Jabiru, you can drink pretty much as many beers as you like.