Darwin

06/02/13 to 07/02/13 – We landed in Darwin around midnight and got a shuttle to the centre of town (officially it’s a city, but it makes Ely or Charroux look big).  We stayed in a backbacker’s dorm for our first night, before we hired a camper van the following morning.  We’d pre-booked the van from Singapore, and were promised air-con.  We realised after driving the van for 15 mins that the air-con wasn’t working.  We returned to the rental company and the man told us that he couldn’t guarantee that it would work.  He said that the girl on the phone shouldn’t have promised it and started to go on about how the poor ‘Sheila’ kept messing things up.  He didn’t seem to have much sympathy and after we whinged a bit, he told us that he didn’t have any other vans, and he gave us a couple of extra gas bottles, which unfortunately weren’t going to keep us cool in our van.  Even though after few kilometres of driving it we knew that the van was a “piece of cheese” for several reasons, the only upside was that we did have one awesome paint job on it, so although we would be sweaty, we would at least look pretty cool on the roads… if only there were other cars on the roads to actually see us.

It was the wet season (still the tropical monsoon climate up here) and although there hadn’t been much rain so far, there were few tourists about.  The locals generally seemed pretty friendly and helpful, except for one surly policeman who, when we him asked how long we could park on the street, responded with “Do I look like a blaaady paaarking attendant?”  Luckily the man in the Tourist Information office was much more friendly and helpful, with a wealth of tips and advice on where to go, where to camp (safely and for free without being woken up by the rangers and getting fined) and where to swim (not in the sea because of box jellyfish at this time of year and not in certain lakes or billabongs where crocodiles are sometimes found to lurk, apparently its a bumper year for crocs).  I can hear and see him talking about the jellyfish now, saying, ”If you think you know what pain is, you don’t”.  He also told us that we had to make sure we had at least 15 litres of water in our car, as it would be difficult to find some drinkable water in some areas (a few days later we had easily drunk up to 5 litres each per day – while usually I struggle to drink more than a litre per day).

We spent the rest of the day in Darwin.  First we looked around the museum (partly to avoid the heat as it was now back up to 33C).  We saw ‘Sweetheart’, a stuffed 5 metre long saltwater crocodile, an exhibition on the 1975 cyclone that flattened the town and learnt about all the nasties living in the Northern Territory, including venomous snakes, spiders, ants, fish and even frogs. We left the museum fearing all the animals we could find in Australia.  We also saw some aboriginal paintings as well as tools to either hunt or use for certain celebrations.  Then it was onto East Point where we saw a cracking sunset, with some interesting cloud formations.

Our camping ground for the night was Darwin Harbour, where we woke to an amazing sunrise and we looked down at the water to see hundreds of huge jellyfish dotted about in the water.  There was no way we were going to have a dip after seeing them, so we drove a short way to Lake Alexander to cool off and make use of the outdoor showers there.  On our way out of Darwin we stopped off at Charles Darwin National Park, which had some short walking trails and several old ammunition bunkers from World War II.  Flora’s ‘thongs’ (flip-flops) broke (her forth pair in 4 months), so we had to cut the walk short and head back to the van.  We left Darwin behind in the rear-view mirror and hit the Stuart Highway heading for the Kakadu National Park.