Darwin And Around - Visiting A Small Part Of A Big Country

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I decided to view our visit to Australia as a test: what would British people be like if they actually had decent weather? On the basis of Darwin, they’d be friendlier, more relaxed and drunk. Though thinking about it now, maybe the first two points are a result of the latter…

So, this is going to be another long blog. Sorry, but we were in Darwin for almost 2 weeks and most blogs are only written about a 5 or 6 days…. I’d therefore recommend that you read this at work or at some other time when you have nothing better to do. Maybe while the bath is running or your wife/girlfriend is watching ‘strictly come dancing on ice idol’.

We arrived in Darwin at 7 in the morning and were knackered. We’d done 5 hours of flying and hadn’t slept since the previous evening. Unfortunately when we reached our hostel and tried to check in, the grumpy man at the desk told us that we had to wait for an hour or so. We don’t know why, there wasn’t anyone in our room and as far as we can tell the room was all made up. I guess he was just enjoying being able to abuse the power that the grand title of ‘hostel manager’ gives you.

Having spent an hour at the local supermarket, wearily and pointlessly walking along the isles. We went back, checked in and went to sleep. Afterwards we woke to explore Darwin, only to find that the whole city was more empty than a Gina G reunion concert. At 5pm on Friday there was barely a car on the road and at 2pm on Saturday over half of the shops in the shopping mall were shut.

It turned out that we’d come to Darwin in the wet season, when everyone who’s sensible goes to the South or East of Australia. This is not only because it rains so much, but also because the wet season is hotter than the rest of the year (close to 40 degrees most days and the hottest place we’d been) and a lot of the local attractions flood… Clearly this wasn’t something we’d considered when booking up the flights.

Regardless, we pressed on and spent the next few days exploring the city. We went to the local park, did some shopping, struggled to cook ourselves food (as eating out is too expensive here) and went to the (very good) Northern Territories museum. Where I learnt that the following animals native to Australia can cause serious pain or even death:

Snakes
Spiders
Jellyfish
Sharks
Normal Fish
Shells (or at least the creatures inside them)
A particularly large bird
Crocodiles
Octopus
And a type of tick

We also went to the WWII Oil Storage Tunnels. Thinking that it might be interesting (and seeing that it was cheap) I dragged Helen along. Unfortunately, parts of the tunnels had a good inch of water on the floor and their idea of a museum was just to stick some photos on the rather bare looking tunnel wall. Basically, I could have replicated the whole experience cheaper at home by standing in a cold bath while looking at photos on the Internet (Note: I don’t recommend trying this).

With the local attractions crossed off the list we got on with the main reason we’d chosen to come to Darwin in the first place, which was to visit the Kakadu National Park and we booked up a two-day tour with a company that had been recommended to us by Helen’s friend Kate. In England, the idea of booking up a tour (when you’re on a tight budget) just to see a National Park would be absurd, but this is Australia. Kakadu is the size of Belgium and is (seemingly) full of crocodiles. Not the sort of place that’s easy to tackle on your own.

The tour was good, it started with a ‘jumping crocodile cruise’. This involved us sitting on a boat and watching as crocodiles jumped up out of the water to grab bits of meat held by a brave lady on the boat with a kind of fishing rod. It was all pretty impressive, by just using their tails the crocodiles could almost jump so far vertically up, that their whole body was out of the water. To make it better, as we watched, we got to enjoy commentary from a lovely old man who spoke like he was reading out Bingo numbers.

On the trip we were lucky enough to see two very large crocodiles called ‘Hannibal Cannibal’ and ‘Michael Jackson’ and were told that one of them hadn’t been seen for over a year. No, I’m not sure why one of the crocodiles was named after Michael Jackson, maybe it was something to do with the moonwalk he did as he swam away… Looking back at it now, these tours probably aren’t such a good idea, what with the fact they reward the crocodiles for jumping high out of the water to eat things. They really are just asking for trouble…

The rest of the tour revolved around driving somewhere for an hour or so and going on a walk to a waterfall for a swim. The walks were slightly marred for me by the fact that some of the paths were flooded and I had only bought trainers. The guide had warned us before we left that some of the tracks had ‘a bit of water on them’ but I figured waterproof trainers would be fine. In true Australian style though the ‘bit’ of water was actually almost up to our knees in places. This meant I spent most of the trip having to stop, take off my trainers, walk through some water, pathetically attempt to walk barefoot on sharp stones, eventually give up and put trainers back on, only to turn the corner and see another flooded walkway...

Still it was always a lovely feeling when you did reach the waterfalls as you could quickly strip down to your swimming stuff and slide into the cool water which, trust me after walking for an hour in 40 degrees, is perfect. I guess the only downside was that after the swim you had to walk all the way back and get incredibly sweaty again. If only Kakadu had been in Singapore, then they would have built an escalator to take you back. Aside from the walks, we got to see Aboriginal rock art (some from tens of thousands of years ago), eat Kangaroo (kinda tough) and spend the night in the tour company’s ‘Safari outpost’.

On our night at the outpost we got to see loads of wildlife. Before bed we took a short drive to use the local campsite facilities. Unfortunately we had been beaten to the showers by about 5,000 crickets and a good sprinkling of frogs. I was lucky, in my shower the crickets stayed pretty still and just watched me. In the girls, the crickets insisted on trying to jump on them and Helen ever had a little voyeuristic frog sit and watch her in the shower. We then took a short drive to a field to look at the stars. The stars were incredibly bright and clear as there wasn’t any artificial light for miles around (though it was slightly strange to see all our constellations upside down). On the way there we passed a large group of wild Dingoes and on the way back we passed a group of wild horses. Oh, and earlier that day we’d seen several wallaroos (small kangaroos) and some cool white parrots. Seriously, in terms of wildlife few places can be as good as Australia!

That night Helen didn’t sleep very well and we were both very hot. Worse though, when we woke up we found that we were covered in tiny itchy bites (particularly Helen and one other girl). Confused by this (as they weren’t like normal mosquito bites) we asked the guide if they could be bed bugs. His reply was ‘well… some people have said they could be, but I’ve never been bitten. Still, yeah, I guess they could be’. Though it’s bad that any tour company would let people (who were paying a fair bit of money) stay in accommodation that’s possibly infested with bed bugs, you’ve got to love the Australian attitude - honest and relaxed. If it’d been an English tour guide they would have gone straight on the defensive, suggesting that the bites must have been obtained outside of the accommodation. Not in Australia though, they just tell it exactly how it is. I’d imagine that if the bloke had awoken to find that everyone had been brutally ripped apart by a murderous axeman and that said axeman was leering over him looking angry, he would have probably said ‘what are you using an axe for? I’d be much easier with a chainsaw’ before going back to sleep.

The tour had been good and though we’d finished with loads of bites and the company hadn’t been great (which included a rather strange Polish lady who always had to be at the front of everything and a 50 year old British woman who seemed intent on acting like she was 16), I’m really glad we did it.

We now had about 6 days left in Darwin. We almost decided to drive the 1500km to Alice Springs in a camper van, do a tour to Ayres Rock and then fly back, but at the last minute decided better of it. It would have doubled the amount we were over budget by, would have all been a bit of a rush and neither me nor Helen had had much experience of driving recently, let alone driven 1500km in just a few days. Instead we ended up just hiring a car to drive to Katherine, a mere 300km away.

We hired a little 1.6 Hyundai Getz and I don’t want to bore you by giving you too many details of the trip (yes, I know, too late!), but I’m going to include the directions from where we picked up the hire car to Katherine city centre - 300kms away:

Turn right out of hire car place
Turn right at end of road
Go straight for 300km
Arrive in Katherine.

My guess is that the Northern Territory is the easiest place to drive in the world. The road was totally straight and there were rarely any other cars on the road (except for the odd ‘road train’ - massive trucks that can be 50 metres long). All you had to do was sit back and push the accelerator.

The only problems came when we had to turn (to pull in to swap drivers or to take a slight detour to see something) as Australian cars have the indicators and windscreen wipers on opposite sides of the steering wheel. This meant that every time we would try to indicate, we would instead put the windscreen wipers on. It must have been confusing for any cars behind as they would see the car ahead turn it’s windscreen wipers on, slow down, begin to turn one way, indicate to turn the other (as we panicked trying to undo the windscreen wiper error), almost grind to a stop and only then, indicate and turn the correct way.

Katherine itself certainly didn’t make the drive worthwhile. Most people there seemed to fall into one of two categories. Either people who looked like they were recovering from a hangover or people who looked like they were making their way towards one. It was like a backward little American town, full of dusty looking buildings with names like ‘fishing and guns’ and ‘the discount liquor store’. My guess is that most of the guests on the Australian version of Jerry Springer would have come from there.

Perhaps most concerning was the large numbers of dirty, drunk looking Aboriginals there. We’d seen quite a few of them in Darwin, but it was nothing compared to Katherine. Having read Bill Bryson’s book on Australia (which is very good) I’d learnt a fair bit about how the Aborigionals had been treated very poorly since the Europeans arrived and seeing it first hand proved this. To be honest, it was all a bit sad and clearly Australia has a long way to go before they’re fully integrated into society.

Our only full day in Katherine was spent visiting Katherine Gorge. The highlight was probably that we had a real, live Australian kookaburra fly down, sit right next to us and let us take pictures - did I mention how the wildlife in Australia is great!? The walk we took at the gorge was also made more exciting for another reason. About two thirds of the way in I looked at Helen’s back to see that her shoulders were covered in what looked like little boils. Not to alarm Helen and cause unnecessary panic, I said ‘Oh my god! Look at your back! It’s covered in weird boilily looking things!’. This didn’t seem to calm the situation as I’d hoped, and the rest of the walk was done at double quick time. After the local information centre (who didn’t know what it was) we went to the local hospital (Helen’s second trip to the hospital so far on the trip). Luckily, they were just heat blisters and weren’t in any way painful.

Before we began to make our way back up to Darwin we decided to make a quick stop at the local hot springs. These were shut due to flooding though so we instead drove an extra 100km South to some different Hot Springs. I don’t quite know why, to be honest I don’t think either of us where that fussed about going to them…

Afterwards (and having seen a frilled lizard and another wallaroo, this time just sitting quietly on the floor of an outdoor café like a dog might in England) we headed back up North. Our final stop was a trip to Lichfield National Park. We couldn’t afford the accommodation of most places we tried, so we ended up staying in some ‘budget’ accommodation in a holiday park. As was seemingly always the case in Australia, the wildlife made it an interesting experience. The room we had was fine, but the female bathroom had a massive spider on the wall (making Helen less keen to go to the toilet in the night) and the blokes’ toilet had a frog. Sitting happily in the middle of the sink.

I can’t say I enjoyed Lichfield NP as much as Kackadu, but it was still a good day during which we visited a few waterfalls, swam in some rock pools and saw massive termite mounds. We then returned to Darwin and spent our last day or so not really doing anything, aside from watching ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ and going to the local library. I would imagine my mum would be reading this with great surprise and pleasure. To hear that her son has finally discovered the joys that can be found in libraries! But I’m sorry mum, it’s not like it seems. You see wireless Internet in Australia seems be virtually none existent. In fact I would genuinely go so far as saying that we found more wireless in Cambodia than in Darwin. On the couple of occasions we asked about it we got puzzled looks. The same sort of looks you’d get if you asked ‘Is there anywhere near by that sells hats for Walruses’? The library did have wireless though and, what’s better, it was free! So we could happily sit there and do things like updating the blog for all you lovely readers.

Our last meal in Darwin was spent the same way as nearly all the evening meals had been before it: redeeming vouchers for free meals in a local backpackers pub. I guess the idea was that people would turn up for the free meal and then hang around long enough for them to make money on drinks. Not me and Helen though! Each night we’d turn up, exchange our voucher for a plate of food, eat our free meal, maybe buy a coke or two and then leave. It was a little demeaning, queueing up with several other scruffy looking people to get food from a sort of canteen, rather a lot like being at a homeless shelter I should imagine, but the food was good!

Next on the list of places to visit was New Zealand; although we’d be back in Australia 6 weeks later. After 8 hours of flying, with a 2-hour stop in Sydney, we arrived in Christchurch. It was late and as restaurants weren’t open any more we ended up getting our dinner from a vending machine… It wasn’t a good start and clearly the machines had something against the British. I put $20 into a machine to get change and though it worked, it just spat the change all over the floor, forcing me to grovel around in front of it picking up the $1 coins. Then, when I tried to put the change into the vending machine to get some food I noticed that it said ‘exact change only’. Therefore, me and Helen carefully worked out what the sum of our food would cost us, put in the money and selected our first item. At which point the machine gave us the item and swallowed the remainder of the money, before spitting 20 cents back at us. I’m not sure why, I think it was just another way to make us feel small. After that we put in more money and the next item got stuck. Finally, I had a bout of amnesia and again put in enough money for two items only for it to swallow all the money after one. All in all out vending machine dinner of two cookies and some crisps had probably cost us about the same amount as a 4-course meal at the Ritz.

That night we slept at a very nice trucker’s place near the airport before heading back to the airport the following morning. This wasn’t so that I could kick the stupid vending machine again, it was because Helen’s parents had arrived and we’d be spending the next 3 weeks with them. Next, you’ll be given a break from my mindless waffle and Helen’s inane chatter as special guest writer Derek Giles (Helen’s dad) will be writing the blog. Now there, at last, is something for you to look forward to!

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Comments

[Jay]

blah!
I like the croc and jellyfish safety signs. They do, after all, need all the protection they can get. Happy Easter (slightly early, yes) and don't forget the choc (Dave) :)

[Nick]

A Theory
Maybe that croc was called Michael Jackson because it preys on small children?