Darwin

4th - 9th of September 2006

Still one city left to explore before leaving Oz - up in the tropical north... Darwin!

First morning in Darwin I followed Henriette to the bus terminal at 6:30, since she was going to the wild west coast with Stuart from our Whitsundays boat. Bid her farewell and went back to bed for a couple of hours :O) I only stayed two nights at Chilis, the hostel we checked into when we arrived, since Maleleuca, another hostel across the road, looked so much nicer! And it was! Most likely the best hostel I've stayed at in my 7+ months in Australia. It was brand new, had lockers and other nice facilities, nice staff and an awesome deck area with two pools, a tub with a waterfall, bar etc.! Soooo nice.

Darwin turned out to be one of my very favourite cities in Australia! It's probably the best place to do nothing... Spent quite a lot of time just hanging out, laying by the pool and that sort of thing - not the worst thing to do in 33 degrees, which we had pretty much all the time. Even at night the temperature rarely dropped to less than about 24 degrees, so you could jump in the pool at night as well - awesome :O) I was in the same room as Nick and Zac from my Uluru tour, so I spent quite a bit of time with those two crazy Kiwis. We had a really funny old guy in our room as well! - A surgeon from Cape Town who worked for The Flying Doctors, had served during the war in Vietnam etc. - so we heard quite a few crazy stories etc. You do meet some quite interesting people when you're travelling :-)

Darwin has a place called the Vic which does $1 meals for backpackers... So as you've probably guessed already, none of us could be bothered to cook! The meals were quite rubbish though, they looked a lot better than they were, and they were a bit too small. We found a solution quite quickly though - another pub, an Irish one nearby, did (better) $1 meals as well. So what we did was go for the $1 meal both places. Quite clever, aye?

One day I was on my way to the gym, for the first time in quite a while, but as I had left my shoes on the Alice to Darwin bus (they fell of my backpack), they wouldn't let me use the free weights in thongs. Damn it. Instead I decided to go to the Royal Botanical Gardens which was close at hand. Though the gardens weren't that extraordinary, it was still a cosy little spot. Quite peaceful. And by walking around the park and all the way back to our hostel I managed to get a bit of exercise anyway :) One afternoon Zac, Nick and I went for a walk to see some of the WW2 historic spots. Not that much to see, but we learned a bit about what happened to Darwin during WW2, saw some oil storage tunnels from the war (that they didn't manage to finish before the war ended) etc.

Twice a week, a big night market takes place on Mindil Beach, where people watch the sunrise, buy all kinds of useless souvenirs, eat great food or watch some of the artists. Clearly, my favorite was eMDee, a band who mixed didgeridoo (four of them actually) with bass, drums, a bit of vocals etc.! I've seen similar bands before, but these guys just did it so much better. Probably because they had four didges, and therefore were able to play four different notes instead of one. In fact, I liked it so much I bought one of their CD's. Sweet.

Just realized that I didn't really take any photos in Darwin... Boo!

I'll tell you a little fact instead: Darwin was named after a famous brain... Charles Darwin, who was a passenger on the boat that dropped the anchor off the coast of north Australia many years ago. Happy now?