Darwin - Australia

Darwin is the Northern Territory's biggest city... we didn't exactly expect a Bangkok-sized city but we were rather surprised to find that it is actually about the same size as Northallerton/Hanley!! It was a Sunday when we arrived but we walked around the 'city' after a heavy daytime sleep and thought we'd walked on to the set of the film "28 days later", it was desolate. It was like they built this large modern town after a cyclone totally flattened it (they really did do that) but then they forgot to invite people to live there! there appears to be more drinking establishments/grog shops then there are people here and it is a fact that people in Darwin consume something like 50% more alcohol than the rest of Australia, on average. It shows...on this first bizarre Sunday afternoon we did witness a man looking somewhat worse-for-wear sat at an outside table of a pizza place...we commented on the state he was in and carried on staring to our horror...a security guard was trying to get the man to pull his trousers up so he could be removed from the premises without disturbing the other diners too much! As he tried to pull up his trousers and underwear it only revealed worse...he had also done a number 2 on the chair!! Yes, I know, it's disgusting and probably inappropriate to put on the blog - but we are scarred by this memory and felt that sharing would help the healing process. On to nicer things...!

We decided that we would only do a 1-day tour to Kakadu Natioal Park and a 1-day tour to Litchfield as the tours were very expensive. We did the Kakadu trip first with a very good company who picked us up at 6 as it is a bit of a drive to get to the NP. Once at the NP we first visited the Bowali Visitor Centre which has information in it about the aboriginal rock art and aspects of life, from here we drove to Ubirr Rock where we took a short walk (good job it was short as the temperature was up around 40 degrees and the humidity was also very high) to see lots of Aboriginal rock art which is thousands of years old. We then did the East Alligator River cruise which took us on to Arnhem Land - a sacred piece of land owned by Aboriginals which non-Aboriginals are not usually permitted on to, and we saw crocodiles on the banks of the river. It was a great day and we stopped off at "Window on the Wetlands" for a glass of wine and cheese, and to take in the views, on our way home. On our walk to Ubirr Rock we also climbed another rock which is where Crocoldile Dundee claimed was his "back garden" in the original film!

The next day we were up eraly again for the Litchfield National Park trip. This trip was less impressive but also more enjoyable as you could swim in the natural waterholes here (you can't swim at Kakadu because of the crocs). We started the day with seeing some indiginous snakes before setting out on the "Jumping Croc Cruise" up the Adelaide River; we went up the river and they held big chunks of meat over the water on a long stick to get the crocs to come and jump up for it. It was really good to see the crocs in full flow propelling themselves out of the water to get the meat. We then walked/drove to several waterholes where we could swim to cool down and enjoy the cold natural spring water.

By the time we left Darwin for Broome we had just about recovered from the culture shock of going from Asia to Oz!