Must say I like Darwin. It's not at all what I expected - I thought it would be like Cairns (thankfully it's not). The city (it's more like a big country town though) does not actually feel like it's in Oz - it reminds me of a Spanish resort. You've got the sea, hotels along the seafront, then behind that is Mitchell Street which is full of bars and cafes/restaurants and here it gets pretty wild at night and then there's a small shopping centre behind Mitchell Street. The streets are all lined with palm trees and because were in the dry season (winter) the weather here is stunning - beautiful sunny warm days and no humidity at all. It's also a very chilled place and everyone here just seems to want to enjoy themselves but maybe it's just like this in the dry and I imagine in the wet season everything could feel quite different. So whilst here I've done the deckchair cinema - very cool, and also I went to the Mindil Beach Sunset market which was great fun and so called as you get a stunning sunset on the beach which everyone seems to go and see before hitting the market which itself is a very arty kind of market with live entertainment including good bands which you can chill out to after you've visited the fantastic food stalls which of course I had to try a few of, apart from the Road Kill Café - which had the slogan "you kill it we grill it" (nice). Then very early on Friday I hit the road with a small 4WD tour into Litchfield, Katherine and Kakadu. Including our driver there were just 8 of us and I must say we made a pretty good gang which was just as well considering that as we were camping in the bush we were going to be extremely smelly at the end of our 4-day trip with no showers and just a small jeep to sit in. So Day 1 was Litchfield - lots of swimming holes, no crocs that we saw. Day 2 was some great canoeing on Katherine Gorge which we were pretty lucky to do as they had only opened the gorge for canoeing the day before after cleaning it of a couple of big saltie crocs - number of crocs we saw was zero (thank god). Then we hit Kakadu National Park for the last couple of days and did some great walking up hills to "safe" swimming holes and then up rocks for sunset and then through parks for some Aboriginal Rock art - number or crocs still zero. Mind you I'm sure I heard one during the middle of the night right by our camp site. There was a big splash followed by lots of screaming birds - sad to say I jumped in the jeep pretty sharpish like a big wussy). But the seeing crocs situ was soon sorted after a short cruise in the wetlands where we saw tons of the big saltie ones and to be honest the boat was so close I was a bit scared in case they jumped up, but hey I'm still here. The tour itself was pretty good and I've realized that I love doing the bush camping thingy (must come from doing Glasto so often). John our driver cooked some great campfire food on the fire that we made from the wood we collected and at nights we just sat around talking, drinking wine and beer and listening to some great music (actually for an Aussie, John had a great taste in music - Belle & Sib, Wolf mother, Lemonheads, Clash etc - and with the same taste in music we obviously got on pretty well and had some good chats). For me the highlight for the tour was the canoeing on Katherine and of course spending 4 days with a great gang of people. In terms of Kakadu itself, it is beautiful and was lovely to see but I think maybe for me it was too soon after seeing The Kimberley which I think is much, much more stunning and interesting. One of the big probs I think with Kakadu is that it is very touristy (blame the croc dundee movie which was filmed here) so there seemed to be hundreds of people everywhere you go - in The Kimberley you're lucky to see people at all - it makes it much more special. Anyway last night I finally got a shower and met the gang for farewell dinner, drinks and football. Yep can't even escape it here - in fact it's gone mad everyone is completely Soccer-roo crazy!! Just here for one more night than tomorrow I'm taking a "short" train journey right the way across (or should that be down) this great country, stopping off on the way to see this rock thing that everyone talks about . And must say I'm really looking forward to the trip. Oh well bye for now folks - got a date with a washing machine (see it's not always exciting).