'Ever since that foreign girl was taken a few years back

Parks doesn't let anyone up the road until they are sure .'

As I forked over $20 for a bush campsite in Kakadu National Park in the Top End of Oz, the warden explained why Sandy Billabong [a permanent waterhole left behind by a drying river] road was still closed to the public this season.

Late, heavy rain this year in the north meant that our campsite had been under water only a few weeks before and the swamp edge was now just past the legal 50m limit on camp proximity to croc habitat.

Known up here as 'salties' - the estuarine crocodiles are at the top of the food chain. They can grow to 5 metres plus, weigh 700 kg, see in the dark feel, have no natural predators, and since hunting was banned in the early 1970s their numbers have exploded. Salties are assumed to be in all waters not above a waterfall [crocs can't climb] and designated waterholes are only opened to swimming once they are cut off from the main river flow in the dry season and a croc management plan and trapping has ensured the water is croc free.

As the sun set we heard them come. I started a fire, frantically spread flaming branches around our campsite and even deployed chemicals to keep them a bay but it was futile. We should have known camping beside a World Heritage Area wetland, and the recent high water ensured that there were too many to contend with. We finally beat a hasty retreat to our tent, unable to leave for ten hours even to use the toilet.

In the morning the damage had been done. Twenty-one bites on my right elbow and ten on my finger from where they rested against the tent mesh as I slept.

The salties can be deadly up here but they have nothing on the Kakadu mossies.