Blogs from City of Darwin, Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia, Oceania - page 20

Hello Everyone.. and Happy Thanksgiving by the way! Sorry for such a long period without e-mail or blog updates. I don't feel all that talkative lately anyway, as this middle section of the adventure has been emotionally challenging, tiring and the effects of being "in transit" for so long are starting to wear me down. Anyway, let me sum up August. I realized soon after making landfall in Cairns (Queensland, Australia) that I hadn't slept on land for 5 months, and that I rarely get to hang out with my cousin Liz, so I flew down to Sydney to visit her and her husband Jim for a week. What a fantastic time in such great company - it made me realize something which I'll touch on later when I talk about human interactions After flying back ... read more

We arrived at our hotel The Mantra Pandanas in Darwin, settled for a bit then headed out to the night markets, how exciting...lots of music, coloured lights and people everywhere! We happily wandered around the stalls selling lots of interesting things...crocodile teeth anyone? The following day we hopped on a bus and went to the Botanical Gardens which were beautiful, then onto the Darwin Museum...if you ever visit Darwin this place is a must, we deceided to go back there to have another wander though and celebrate our 39th Wedding Anniversary in their delightful Cafe' out front overlooking Fannie Bay. My Dad was stationed in Darwin during the WW2 so I had a special interest in our visit to the East Point Military Museum...certainly when we left, we had a better understanding of just what went ... read more

After the luxury of Singapore Airport, we arrived bleary eyed in the far smaller, less attractive Darwin Airport. We then had to endure the rigorous security checks, which at 4am and with no sleep was rather aggravating. Eventually, we collected our bags and escaped customs with relatively few problems. We entered the main part of the airport and headed straight for the information desk where we were met with a moody Austalian woman weighing around 250lbs. Needless to say she was very unhelpful and told us that Darwin was likely to be busy and we would have trouble finding accomodation. However, she was nice enough to inform us that we should stay in the airport for a few hours since nothing in Darwin would be open yet! We waited around for a copuple of hours and ... read more

Arriving at Darwin International at 1am nearly two weeks ago, I slept for 5 hours on an airport couch and watched the red sunrise before taking a taxi into the city. Darwin is not at all what I expected. Despite being the 'capital' of the Northern Territory, the city centre is quite small and relatively low-rise. It was quiet to start with, but as the day progressed hundreds of backpackers crawled out of the shade and into the bars. I had become so used to the New Zealand winter that I didn't bother booking ahead but we're in the peak season here and I really had trouble finding a hostel. There was one point where I was considering sleeping in the park, but things worked out eventually. Upon finding long-term accommodation at a really laid back ... read more

We finally got internet service in Darwin. I liked the Cyclone Tracy display at the Museum. There was a room that had sounds like Cyclone Tracy. It was very loud, dark and scary. In Darwin we had lots of swims in the pool at the caravan park. We went to see the WWII Tunnels that were built to store oil in, but were not finished until after the war ended and were never used. We got to walk inside 1 of them. It had lots of water running in the tunnel. It had photos of the bombing that Japan did to Darwin in WWII. One day, when the car got a snorkel put on, we walked to the Aircraft Museum - the home of the B52. There were lots of planes in there. The B52 took ... read more