So before I even left the plan changed again... Borneo was cancelled and instead I get to spend two months trying not to be eaten in Papua New Guinea - should be fun! The trail we're working on is described by the lonely planet as "suitable only for masochists and Israeli paratroopers" and since I'm not the latter I guess I'm option A! Trip got off to a great start after a strange check in process at Heathrow that left me with an upgrade to "premium" economy. No idea why they call it that - there's nothing economy about it! linin tablecloth, bone china crockery, proper wine glass, wider seat, loads of leg room, etc... just what I needed for a 12.5 hour flight! Then what with that and a swim in the outdoor pool in the full moon at Singapore airport (thanks for the tip Claire!) I arrived in Darwin feeling fairly civilised. This rapidly deteriorated as I arrived in the town at 5am in the dark. Nothing was open, so George (a Taiwanese guy I met on the airport shuttle) and I dumped our stuff and wandered around til the cafe opened and then wandered round like zombees til we could check in at 1. Pretty miserable. Once we checked in it got a lot better! Darwin is a strange place. It is unneccessarily hot and filled with backpackers - mostly Brits and Irish - who seem to have come here and got stuck. They have mostly been here ages either working or "looking" for work. I'm not doing either of those things and was determined to book to go to Kakadu and then get out of here! Then I couldn't get on a tour til saturday.... I was trying to toughen myself up for PNG so went for the "unleashed" tour which required higher levels of fitness and included longer hikes and sleeping in a swag. This then became the second thing I've booked to do that was cancelled! so I was upgraded to the normal 3 day trip which was quite good really as the group was bigger and it turns out they wouldn't have done very long hikes on the other anyway as at 40 degrees and 80% humidity they didn't want people collapsing! We went for a boat trip spotting "salties" on the Mary river - apparently the highest concentration of them in the world - and then spent 2 days in Kakadu National park which is a world heritage centre and got to see some amazing landscapes and aboriginal art. In the evening we joined up with two other groops and our guide Wazza sang aboriginal songs accompanied by the other guide on didgeridoo. Awesome. They then invited everyone else to entertain by country group and after being well and truly outdone by the Swedes doing a frog dance round an imaginary pole and the Germans doing some weird kind of line dance we had to admit defeat. I tried my best, I just couldn't remember any decent English songs and gave up when I realised I didn't know what happened to Mary Jane between dating and being eaten up by t'worms... We slept in fixed tent/shed like structures which were stupidly hot but probably more comfortable than the swags and then got up early to head for Jim Jim falls which were closed for swimming as the water was so low and didn't actually even have water flowing over them! The pools at the bottom were beautiful none the less. Also had a scary camera breaking moment when one of the girls in my group dropped my camera thus breaking the lens so it wouldn't retract. Half an hour of stress and panic later I got annoyed with it and forced it back in to the camera, hearing a horrible clicking on the way. It then worked. Moral of the story is that brute force does work... That evening we camped in a campsite swarming with wallabies and water buffalo (if they can swarm...!) we went on a walk just before sunset to a little creek nearby - expecting a 5 minute stroll - that turned out to be a 30 min loop getting deeper and deeper into dark jungle. I obviously took the lead (trying to be tough and prep for PNG!) but freaked myself out when I walked into - and bounced off - a spiders web that crossed the path. The spider was just above head level and was about the size of a small hand. Think it was some kind of Orb but unable to identify as yet... after that we rushed thorough as quickly as we could and I realised I need to work harder on toughening up! The third day was spent in Litchfield National park where we swam in Florence falls and jumped of the rocks above into the pool at the bottom. We also went to some rock pools where you can jump in. I failed to pick up a stone off the bottom of the 6m deep one - the challenge set by Wazza, which isn't really surprising given my failure to pick up the brick from a 3m swimming pool at school when I was 10 and the lack of any sort of diving since! not to mention the logistics of diving in a bikini! then we headed to the termite mounds where we saw both Cathedral and magnetic mounds (magentic being north-south facing so as to avoid main heat of the day.) I also went to the local croc sanctuary - Crocosaurus Cove - where they have 7 large crocs with a great selection of names - Bruce, Chopper, Houdini (for obvious reasons), and Denzel being a few. My favourite was Burt who is the actual star of Crocodile Dundee and is now about 80 years old. Also in other random wanderings I spent a morning (again trying to prep for PNG) in the Botanic gardens looking at loads of cool tropical plants and tonnes of varieties of palm! Favourites were the chenille plant and the chanel no. 5 plant! I finished off darwin with an end of tour night out with most of the group. It turned out to be a pub quiz night and with a team of 12ish we couldn't lose - and didn't! lots of fun! So I left Darwin exactly a week after I arrived - longer than I intended to stay but had a great time and met some really nice people both at the hostel and on the tour, some of whom I'm hoping to bump into again en route. After being forced to stay up and not sleep before my 2.30 bus to the aiport by two of the guys in the hostel I left them behind and went on to meet Roser, a Spanish lady from Barcelona who was also going to Cairns and had in fact been on the same flight to Darwin and stayed in the same hostel - we just hadn't met. So I wasn't alone for long! Already frustrated by having to make friends and leave them behind. Guess I have to get used to that. On to Cairns....