2002/11 Australia trip - Darwin |
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Then we rejoined the Stuart Highway and turned north to Darwin. We needed to be close to town to visit a Toyota dealer the next morning, so we picked Shady Glen as the closest campsite. We were told that there are no beach campsites in the Darwin area because of the biting sand flies.
Then we set off that evening into Darwin looking for a restaurant serving Sandie’s favourite fish, the barramundi. We had no luck in the city itself. The city’s quite pretty but it’s short on open restaurants on a Sunday evening. Sandie asked at a BP station, and they recommended a place on Cullen Bay, a super-touristy spot that we’d completely missed.
The Schooner Inn turned out to be quite posh and I didn’t measure up to their dress code, with my singlet, shorts and sandals, not to mention a good layer of dirt and dust from a few days of bush camping. I think I got away with the sandals as I had socks on to protect my blistered toes. The singlet turned out to be the main problem, so Sandie took off my shirt, which she’s been wearing to avoid sunburn, and handed it back to me. All was now OK. Her singlet was acceptable even though mine wasn’t. It was a very good meal, even though I’m not as enthused about barramundi as she is.
Back at Shady Glen it was about as hot and humid as in the worst Minnesota weather in July. I decided to use the roof bed so we wouldn’t have to be close to each other. We’d also found that our campsite backed onto a truck terminal with noise and lights all night. On the other side of us was a German capsule bus, with about 20 people scrambling into their sleeping capsules inside the bus.
Monday October 21st
We didn’t sleep well, but we were up early to avoid the Darwin rush hour and get to Bridge Toyota for the campervan’s 5000K service. We found that Darwin doesn’t have a rush hour. It doesn’t even have a rush. We also needed to find a chemist and doctor for one of Sandie’s prescriptions. None of this worked out. At Toyota we got “You don’t have an appointment? We might be able to fit you in tomorrow.” At the doctor’s we got “You don’t have an appointment? How about Thursday? That’s the way things work here.” Nobody moves too fast here – it’s like being in Alabama. We booked with Toyota but gave up on the doctor. So now we had a day to kill in Darwin.
We drove to Charles Darwin National Park in the bay south of Darwin. The first thing we saw was a sign “Caution Cover up - Biting Insects”. It was actually OK as there weren’t many and they only attacked Sandie. We went down to the “beach”, but it turned out to be just mud and mangrove swamps, with a lot more bugs.
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Charles Darwin park (3.25) |
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There were also remnants of World War 2: buried Nissen huts, still in use by the park. Darwin is full of army, air force and navy bases, and the main airport, so the city has lots of dead space in its centre that you can’t drive through. This was originally because it was close to Japan, but now it’s because it’s even closer to Indonesia.
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Dripstone Cliffs (5.12) |
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We drove to the other side of town to a real beach at Dripstone Cliffs and Casuarina Reserve. The beach had miles of golden sand but no people. The reason is the box jellyfish, a rather unpleasant animal that inflicts great pain and kills lots of people. Its season is October through May in the Darwin area, so nobody swims then. We walked the beach and had lunch under the trees, and then drove out of Darwin to find an alternative campsite. We chose one at Howard Springs, further outside of Darwin. It was out in the country, so no truck depots. Instead we had gangs of ibis patrolling the site, looking for weak-willed tourists.
By this time we’d worked out how to navigate our way around Darwin. It’s built around the suburb circle. There are ring roads and roundabouts that go around the suburbs and secondary roads that go into the suburbs. So you end up taking a sinusoidal route around the suburbs but you don’t actually go into a suburb, as you won’t find a way through. Overall, it works well, probably because there isn’t a lot of traffic. Also, they started from nearly a clean slate after Darwin was wiped out by Cyclone Tracy on Christmas Day 1974.
We drove back into Darwin’s Cullen Bay to book up for a harbour cruise that evening. There were lots to 
choose from but we picked the Stargazer, a pretty sailing ship. The skipper had built the boat himself. There were about a dozen of us passengers sprawled around the deck. We motored out through the lock and then switched to sail. He took us to the areas we’d seen from shore during the day. We were mainly in the Beagle Gulf, but we were looking out towards the Arafura Sea and the Sea of Timor. His assistant served food and beer and munchies.
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Beagle Gulf (8.57) |
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We passed a number of Indonesian fishing boats arrested for illegal fishing, waiting on their court cases. The Australian government sent out chickens and rice to keep the crews alive until their cases came up. Then they would probably be sent back to Indonesia and their boats burned. The assistant served us champagne as the sun went down. It was a great relaxing evening with the cool breezes keeping the humidity at bay.
It was hot back on land, but Howard Springs was far enough inland to be less humid than Shady Glen. All our neighbours seemed to be Germans in rented Britz campers, unconscious when we arrived and unconscious when we left the next morning. The campground was peaceful, and the only activity was from possums dropping fruit and nuts on our heads.
Tuesday October 22nd
We were up before dawn and first in line at Bridge Toyota that morning, but it still took them about four hours to do the service and to also look at the air conditioning, which was behaving a bit strangely. The paperwork seemed to take at least half of this time.