Made It To Darwin

Location: Darwin
Weather: Hot n'Humid

Was good to get to Darwin and a real bed after driving about 2200kms in 4 days. Checked into the highly recommended Meleleuca on Mitchell backpackers. It was located right in the city centre and has apparently only been open a few months. Had a swimming pool, big kitchen and balcony area. It was very clean and had good rooms/beds except for some reason they put me in a 6 bed dorm(4 bed dorms were the same price) and even though there weren't that many people staying in the place they insisited on filling our room up to the brim

Well Darwin...better than Broome and Perth, but considering it is supposed to be a city it is more like a small town. There's a nice esplanade that looks out onto the sea and this leads to the colonial looking Parliament House and there is a wharf area where I went fishing a couple of times(didn't catch anything) but not much else. In fact the only highlight of the town other than the Aboriginal Artwork outlets is the Aqua Scene Fish Feeding, where they have been feeding the fish in the sea for 40 years and so hundreds of them appear at high-tide! you pay to go in and get some bread and you can feed the fish, which is great fun. Almost everything else is out of town, such as the giant Casurina shopping mall and even the Botannical Gardens (which aren't bad) are 20mins walk away. Being Wet Season it also rained a lot during my time there, like every other hour, which didn't help.

hmmm! what else? ah yes, as is customary in almost every North WA and Northern Territory town there were a large number of alcoholic Aborigine's hanging around Darwin. Allegedly all the bad Abo's get sent to the towns whilst the good ones stay in their reservation areas, so many tourists get a very bad impression of them, which is understandable when you're constantly shouted "OI!" at or sworn at or asked for $4 for a 'bus ticket' (translation: for a beer) and when you say NO they say "hey we got some real tight fisted people round here". However, after a time they can become more entertaining than annoying to some of us travellers, you hear/see something new from them every day, usually something totally unbelievable, talk about a different culture. Wish I'd had the guts to take some photos of them in Darwin, if you've not been to these areas you'll have no idea what I mean and most of them aren't that bad.

By JamesReed on 21.12.04 @ 06:52 AM GMT