Our Day Out

We had got up early that morning to go on a tour. These were put on for crew members at heavily discounted prices to get us all away from the ship and see some of the places the passengers go to rather than the normal crew member destinations of coffee shops, internet cafes and supermarkets.

             So it was unusual, that I was on a bus to see the crocodiles from the port of Darwin (which is on the north coast of Australia). Darwin is the biggest town for hundreds of miles although this is rather like saying a puddle is the biggest expanse of water in a desert and like the desert, Darwin is also hot and dusty.

             I guess the mix of the early morning and the warm weather was the reason that our driver missed the turning and our bus rolled down the bank and ended up on its side in the swamp. The thing I remember about this was the silence, nobody screamed or made any noise at all, we were all just stunned, confused, possibly dreaming. As luck would have it, nobody was badly injured but now there was the problem of how to get out of the bus since the door we arrived through was currently underwater.

We had safety drills on the ship every two weeks and because of this we were all actually fairly calm. The exception to this was the driver who seemed to be having a panic attack and yelling (in a Dad’s Army way) not to panic.

             We quickly found that the emergency escape window was now above us and since they were nearest, the casino dealers were tasked with breaking the window with the attached hammer. They hit it with a huge bang but unfortunately, on impact the window stayed intact, and the hammer broke. Fortunately (even though it was early morning) the casino team had brought bottles of beer with them, and it was one of these bottles that broke the window. At this point glass, and beer, cascaded downwards bouncing off everything and everyone. Then to add to the whole joy of our adventures, mosquitos filled the overturned bus.

As the bus slowly sunk into the swamp, we all climbed out of the window and had to jump into the water. It was a fair height and the process of climbing onto the seats, pulling ourselves through the broken window and jumping through, was a physical challenge most of us were not planning on doing in our tired early morning state.

Then we started to notice that we were not alone in the swamp, there must have been about a dozen crocodiles looking at us. Going into survival mode, there was no time to worry about the water, mosquitos, glass or any other swamp creatures. Instead, the challenge was how best to climb through the window, avoiding the obstacles and not cutting ourselves. The crocs were not in the least bit interested by all this commotion and carried on sun tanning.

We were picked up in groups of four by rescue vehicles but rather than going back to the ship instead we (surprisingly in hindsight) carried on with the tour which seemed very dull in comparison with the journey. It did, however, give us all a great excuse for being late back to work. Perhaps there is a reason we usually just went to the supermarket…