Blogs from Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia, Oceania

We didn’t quite know what to expect of Darwin, with again, a lot of unfavourable press coverage clouding our vision. We were pleasantly surprised at what a colourful, multicultural city Darwin is today. Darwin's proximity to South East Asia makes it a key link between Australia and countries such as Indonesia and East Timor. The city has been almost entirely rebuilt four times, firstly following devastation caused by a cyclone in 1897, another cyclone in 1937, Japanese Air Raids in 1942, and Cyclone Tracy in 1974. Darwin endured over sixty air raids during WWII. We set out to explore the Darwin CBD, and met up with our 2022 traveller friends Mandy and Glenn from Lakes Entrance for lunch overlooking the harbour. After farewelling our friends later that afternoon, we enjoyed a swim in Darwin Harbour lagoon. ... read more

We are scheduled to take three days to get to Darwin, a city named to honour Charles Darwin. But the Captain announces that we are going to arrive a day early and have two days there as a compensation for missing Bali. Now Darwin is the Capital of the Northern Territories (NT) a vast part of Australia, which itself is huge. (Australia is actually almost the same size as the continental USA.) yet the whole population of the NT is only about 250,000, 120,000 of whom live in Darwin. It is in short more a mid sized town rather than a city and once you get outside the town, settlements are few and far between. Darwin itself was largely destroyed by Japanese bombing in WWII and then levelled again in 1974 by Cyclone Tracy, so pretty ... read more

Monday morning we were on the road again . We had plotted a route through the Marrakai Road which as luck would have it, cut off a big section of sealed mainroad - just to our liking. Marrakai Road was a red dirt road still with quite a few puddle & stream crossings. Even though they are into the start of the dry season there is still a lot of wet patches on the road. Takes a few months for all this to dry up. The first challenging section we encountered was a full road-width puddle allowing little room for manoeuvring. I dropped my front wheel into the mud but luckily had enough momentum to ride out the other side. Keith was not so lucky dropping his bike, fortunately away from the muddy puddle & onto ... read more

Today’s our last day in Darwin. This also means that it’s our last day with ready access to a washing machine for quite a while, so I decide to put on a load. The machine tells me that this will take two and a half hours. I ask Issy why it takes so long to wash clothes in a machine when I could have washed them in the sink in a fraction of the time. The look I get suggests that maybe I should have kept my mouth shut. We head off down to the Darwin Waterfront Precinct. First stop is the World War 2 oil storage tunnels. Well first stop for me. Issy decides that maybe tunnels aren’t for her and heads off instead to get her nails done. The first Darwin air raid destroyed ... 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