Australia Adventures Part 4

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Our trip in Darwin started and ended in a friendly way. By this I mean we contacted a member of the Blue Knights, an association of motorcyclists who are either currently or retired emergency personnel, police, fire, ambulance. My dad is a member and we found out that they had a "Northern Territories" branch so we thought it would be nice to meet someone. Luckily, this someone worked at customs at the airport so we had a nice greeting on the way into Darwin! From there we went to our extremely shady hotel. It was supposed to be top rated, and as we found out, for Darwin, it was! Our room was spacious but nothing like Cairns, and there was some crazy guy in the lobby being chased by security, and there was a bloody handprint on the bathroom door. So that was special. Needless to say we changed rooms and the rest was much better!

The highlight of staying in Darwin for a few days before heading into Kakadu national park were the Mindal markets. We walked down there and had an absolutely fabulous night. The markets were really neat with lots of different stands, all with quite a hippy theme to them. My mom and I had our fortunes read which was really interesting and we tasted tons of great food - with the one exception of the camel. My parents went to the 'roadkill' shack and came back with a stick full of camel, which tasted exactly as you'd expect a camel to smell. I was cautious and took a small bite but Dzl made the mistake of taking off a piece of it and suffered from 'camel taste' the whole evening. We made up for it by having tiny 'dutch' pancakes with jam and they were amazing. There were Hawaiian dancers and fire breathers, and a guy named "Mick" who was the very proud owner and operator of "Mick's whips" a fantastic show of bull whips, cracking the sound barrier in a pattern so precise it came out as music when he cracked the whips all over the place. It was truly spectacular but not nearly as spectacular as the sunset on the beach moments later. People flocked from the market to the beach, where very appropriately, an Aboriginal man played a digeridoo as the sun quickly set on the horizon, and we all listened hard to hear the 'hiss' as it touched the ocean.

We finished off our night by going to the casino directly next door the markets and unfortunately my dad who was wearing a sleeveless shirt could not go in; but my mom and I went in, she won $100 and we left again, in all of 10 minutes. Yay for slot machines! We decided we could afford the taxi ride home after that and went to bed and slept well before our big journey into the outback.

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