I woke up and I just saw crocodiles around.
Hundreds, crocodiles around everywhere where we slept.
You can see their eyes shining. It's like,
"Okay, we better do this right because if not,
we're gonna be in trouble."
My name is Orlando Duque,
I'm a professional cliff diver from Colombia.
I have 13 world titles in cliff diving,
two Guinness World Records.
This is a story when I went diving in Australia
and was completely surrounded by crocodiles.
And I was not expecting that.
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My career started as a regular diver in a pool.
What happens is all the pools are the same.
You kind of lose that challenge, that emotion that the sport brings.
So I decided to move to cliff diving
because it was just a lot more exciting.
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In between competitions, we would try to search for these crazy places
or different places to do some dives and take pictures.
We were trying to get the sport to be known a little bit more
and then the idea of diving in Australia came.
One of the Australian divers, he heard about some places
and then he just proposed it to us. He said, "Hey, let's go on a trip.
Let's get on a boat, go up the river and find some places to dive."
I said yes immediately.
Travelling to Australia,
you always think about sharks, you always think about crocodiles,
you always think about spiders.
Uh, I always say like everything in Australia has tried to kill you,
every animal.
We had a paramedic travelling with us.
He was a specialist on snakes,
so he had a full kit of antidotes
and anything we'll need in case we had a snakebite.
And when you're landing and you look around,
and you don't see any houses, you don't see anything around you,
it's just dirt around the airport,
you know you're at an interesting place.
The idea was the whole crew jumping on a houseboat
and just going up river searching for these places to dive.
The river's really big, really big and wide.
You know, it was really murky, the water,
you couldn't see much of what was in the water.
On travelling time,
when we were moving from one point to the next,
we would sleep in the boat but then we'll arrive in this camping ground
on the riverbanks and we will sleep there.
The first night we were sleeping,
I woke up and I just saw crocodiles around.
You hear something and immediately you grab your flashlight
and then you're shining it at the crocodiles.
If you shine the light to the river, you can see their eyes shining
and then you can see how many crocodiles there is in the water.
Of course, there was crocodiles around everywhere where we slept.
But you're sleeping on a platform that is about one meter high
and you hear the crocodiles around you but they cannot climb on top,
you know, they cannot go on top of the platform.
But this is not a place where I can just go walk around
and wander around without a problem,
you know, I have to be really careful.
It was myself, an Australian diver and a Russian diver.
The Russian diver never left the boat.
He wouldn't want to go on the campgrounds.
He was really scared of animals.
We're not really told like directly that we were gonna sleep outside,
surrounded by crocodiles,
but, uh, I think if they told us ahead of time
that that was gonna be the situation,
uh, I probably would have stayed on the boat. Ha, ha.
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When we're doing this diving at remote places, you know,
you have to deal with what nature puts there for you.
One time in Colombia,
we were doing this project in an island called Malpelo
which is this huge rock in the middle of the Pacific.
By the time we start climbing up and we make our up,
there was these crabs just chewing on our climbing ropes.
They were eating the rope and... Ha, ha.
I mean, that's probably the worst thing that you want to see
when your safety line is being chewed on by a crab. Ha, ha.
We spent quite a few days on the river,
found really nice places to dive
and take pictures but when you look
across to the other side of the river,
the whole other side of the river was just filled with crocodiles.
Hundreds, 100, 200, 300, maybe, some of them with their mouth open.
My first reaction was to ask the guide.
I'm like, "Hey, come over here, what happened,
what's up with the crocodiles?" He's like, "Listen, don't worry about it.
They're outside of the water during the day. They love to take the sun.
You're not going to see any of them in the water."
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Now you have to get off the boat,
you have to go in the water, you have to climb the cliff.
The first few times,
I would just get in the water for the dives.
You know, I'm just in the water for the dive,
out on the boat and then back on the cliff.
No swimming, no relaxing, no nothing.
After the third or fourth day, we took out a boat, we were skurfing.
We were riding boards on the river,
we were swimming, we were a lot more relaxed.
I mean, I don't know how fast a crocodile can swim
but, ha, ha, I had always in my mind
that I could swim faster to the boat and get out in case of something.
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