Bicentennial Park, Darwin (July 2014)

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Saturday, 26th July 2014

On our third day, we shifted somewhere closer to the city centre where the Mantra On The Esplanade was located. This was a hit-and-miss affair even though our spacious bedroom came with a fine sea view overlooking the longish Bicentennial Park.

Within the park grounds, there was a mini beach and an impressive Memorial dedicated to the USS Peary, the American warship that sunk off Darwin Harbour by the Japanese bombers in February 1942.

We spent most of our day at Bicentennial trying very hard to catch the sea breeze that would start sending our kite to the skies. This was a relatively futile attempt even though we had some fun out of it.

Since our new room no longer came with an attached kitchen, we had to settle our lunch and dinner at Nandos and the Vietnamese Saigon Star Restaurant. In between meals, we popped over to Woolworths for our supermarket fix.

This was also a day when we got to know our CBD a little bit better, did things a little bit slower in order to conserve our energies for the road-trip the day after. There was even some spare time for a dip in the hotel pool even though our encounter was nothing quite like what we had experienced at the previous accommodation.

So much for the higher prices!

Generally, like most developed places, we didn't find the accommodation choices to be value-for-money. This was more so during the dry where the inflated prices kicks in.

The minor consolation was probably the low airfares we paid through Jetstar. The savings were timely to defray the costs of our accommodation.

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