I’m woken at the crack of dawn by noise that would wake the dead - thousands of birds in chorus in the trees around the hotel. I wonder how Issy can possibly still be asleep. I check to make sure that she is actually still with us, but all good - the snoring was a bit of a giveaway. I decide to take the opportunity for an early morning trip out to the Mamukala Wetlands. On the off chance that Issy stirs before I get back I leave her a note to tell her where I've gone. At least now if I get taken by a croc, she’ll know where to tell the searchers to look. I arrive at the car park to find that I’m the only person here. I read a large crocodile warning ... read more

We think our motel room’s supposed to be cleaned and made up each day, but it’s hard to be sure. When we got back yesterday the beds looked fairly similar to the way we’d left them; we had to remake them before we went to sleep. We decide to find out for sure. We pull all the bedclothes half off and leave the dirt from our shoes in a neat pile in the middle of the floor. If today’s tourist attractions prove to be a fizzer at least now we’ll have some detective work to amuse ourselves with when we get back here later this afternoon. We head south along The Track to our first stop for the day, the Cutta Cutta Caves. We’re questioned at the ticket counter as to whether or not we’re both ... read more

Today we head south along “The Track” to Katherine... well they called it "The Track" when I was here in 1980. I haven’t heard that term used this time, so maybe it’s improved. That wouldn’t be hard. It was, and still is, the only road into and out of Darwin, and in those days you took your life in your hands using it. If you happened to come across a road train on one of its hundreds of sharp narrow bends, well good luck, and no car I drove would have been a match for any of the many water buffalo that seemed to like taking up positions in the middle of the bitumen. I wonder if we’ll survive the day. First stop is the Adelaide River War Cemetery. This was established in the immediate aftermath ... read more

Today we’ll be heading thirty or so kilometres south down the highway to Berry Springs. We pass a turn off to the Howard Springs Holiday Park. The only reference we've heard to Howard Springs since we arrived up here is as the home of a quarantine facility - the one they'll lock us up in if anyone suspects we've been in contact with a COVID case. We hope the Holiday Park and the quarantine facility aren’t the same thing and that the name's not just a feeble attempt to make the inmates feel a bit better about themselves. I think if I was running a holiday park in Howard Springs I’d move it somewhere else, or at very least give it a different name. First stop is the Government owned and operated Territory Wildlife Park. We’re ... read more

First stop this morning is the Darwin Museum and Art Gallery ......well the museum at least; it seems that the art gallery bit is temporarily closed while they get it set up for a major exhibition. The Museum includes a large section on Cyclone Tracy which hit Darwin on Christmas Eve in 1974. The residents didn't take warnings about Tracy all that seriously as they'd been warned about another cyclone a few weeks earlier which ended up more or less bypassing the town and not really affecting anyone. Tracy virtually wiped Darwin out. Seventy one people died, few buildings were left standing, and the damage bill was close to seven billion dollars in today's money. A lot of the buildings effectively exploded as they weren't designed to withstand cyclone force winds. The town was largely evacuated ... read more