Darwin

Darwin

When we landed in Darwin, we initially had no real idea of how to get to the Hostel. Luckily, I had a Charlotte with me. A Charlotte is an exceptional useful thing to have when travelling, as a Charlotte is capable of getting us anywhere for extremely reasonable prices.
In this case, she found the airport shuttle bus and proceeded to navigate other passengers to where it picked up from, as there were no signs and it was the middle of the night. They started following us because she was the only one who seemed to know what she was doing and where she was going. Once the bus arrived (after a 15 minute wait at a random area of the road), we had a trail of followers who had decided against getting a taxi after hearing Charlotte explain exactly when, where and how much it would cost despite there being literally no signs or information about it anywhere.

We got to the YHA and then were checked in and sent up to our room. Now, if you've ever been in a hostel that houses long-term FIFO workers, you'll probably guess what happened next. We stumbled into our room in a burst of bags and balanced possessions and tripped over what was a seething mass of clothes, boots, vodka bottles, books and various other things that may or may not have been living.  You could not move for stuff and the smell was that of the great unwashed miner. We went back downstairs, tentatively asked for a new room only to be told that while there was space, we weren't allowed to move because we were't a priority because we had hostel passes that weren't equal to the full price of the night. We emphasised that that was the entire point of the hostel pass to deaf ears, and went back to our room to find the stereotypical blonde-dreadlocked middle-class English owner of the pile of stuff spread out on his bed in his underwear. We chatted with him, I took the top bunk, Charlotte took another and we slept.

We awoke the next morning and went out and explored Darwin. Which took about an hour as Darwin itself is tiny. We did find the absolutely lovely marina though (picture above) with a wavepool! There was a gated off swimming section and a beach with a netted swimming area. It was pretty much the only place to swim in Darwin as, due to the alarmingly high number of things-that-will-kill-you, swimming at the beach is not advised. You can if you want to, it's just that we didn't feel like tangling with crocs, sharks and killer jellyfish.

Being the middle of winter, it was quite cool in Darwin. And by cool we mean a consistent 30 degrees centigrade. There was a cold spell while we were there, with alarmist newspapers loudly announcing "THE BIG CHILL: GATHER YOUR COATS AS THIS EVENING WILL DIP TO 15 DEGREES!".

15 degrees is a nice day in England...

So we strolled around Darwin for the day, and spent the next day relaxing and sunbathing by the wavepool. In the evening of the second day, we went to the cinema. A cinema that had no staff at all until we'd waited for 15 minutes and a tired looking woman came out of the toilets and sold us tickets...

Looks nice. Actually has the potential for a violent, bloody and stingy death.

We spent the evening strolling by the beach, and as you can see, Darwin has some spectacular sunsets.

Day 3 and we thought we'd explore! We hired a car and drove down to Litchfield national park. We wanted to go to Kakadu but it was prohibitively expensive and very far away. We're glad we did, Litchfield was spectacular. An hours drive in the hot sun took us to the outside of the park and we spent all day visiting the essential sites, such as these giant termite mounds below:

I also swam in several beautiful, large freshwater water holes. These were amazing, with plenty of fish and wildlife around and stunning waterfalls. Charlotte avoided the swimming, mostly due to the signs saying "There are harmless freshwater crocodiles in here, but there may occasionally be a saltwater crocodile as well"

Saltwater crocs are the massive ones that will, and do, eat people.

I fancied a swim though, and everyone else was there, and the sign did say that there usually weren't any saltwater crocs. Also the staff at the shop were actively encouraging the swimming so I took a dip and swam under some magnificent waterfalls and then found myself in this pool underneath a waterfall that had sat in the sun and heated up.

We then visited a long river/rockpool collection that had lots of very deep water holes in it. Charlotte did swim in this one because the watering holes weren't remotely big enough for crocs and there were tonnes of people.

In the evening, after the Litchfield adventure, we went to Darwin's large outdoor market where we explored loads of stalls and stands, and there was this guy cracking his whip:

On the last day, Charlotte had found out about a free water park with giant water slides. So we visited that, played in the water park for hours, found a weird skatepark and then went back to the hostel.

Can't get enough of that wavepool though.