triplog

Today we leave Darwin, on our way out through Kakadu and Arnhem Land towards the Coburg Peninsula. Overall Darwin is a really relaxed kinda place - there’s some cool stuff to do - highly recommend Mindil Markets on a Thursday night (awesome street food), and a sunset drink in the beer garden of the Ski Club (waterskiing, not snow, obviously). Wish we could have spent longer here, but we have a schedule to keep

On our way out we stopped for pies at Tommos Pies just outside Darwin - fantastic. And no fancy claims about being the ‘worlds greatest pie’ or anything, just really well made Aussie pies.

Anyways, I may be out of range again for a while - we’re gonna spend a week up in Coburg, then make our way back down through Kakadu and across the gulf towards Queensland.

… I was really into this sort of stuff. Our campground (’Shady Glen’!) in Darwin is right opposite the Darwin airport runways - complete with the deafening roar of airforce jets taking off and landing at all hours. There’s also a flight museum maintained by volunteers, so yesterday Matt and I strolled over for a look-see.

All in all, it wasn’t as interesting as I remember this stuff being - very much of a trainspotting or twitcher vibe to these sort of places, a small group of people really obsessed with the details of this stuff… Don’t get me wrong, they’ve done some awesome work restoring old machines. But still, I wasn’t that into it.

Woah! I’m freakin’ up to date!!!

As I mentioned in this post, I’ve had a massive gap (almost 2 months) of not being able to update this site on a regular basis, so I decided to backdate all the entries starting from when we left Broome up until now (we’re in Darwin). If you want to read them in order, click here to jump back to the start of the backdated entries and just use the “next post” link at the top of the page to move through them all sequentially until you get to this post.

We got to Darwin a few days ago, and have been running around doing the usual town chores (repairs, new tyres for troopy etc) - but also, as luck would have it, we got here right in time for the Darwin festival. So we’ve had the opportunity to go out and see some festival stuff - we saw a deckchair cinema flick - Children of the Silk Road - and caught a performance by a Korean percussion group which was just amazing.

Tonight we went to the Mindil Markets, which are held every week on the beach in Darwin - and caught up with Kath, who’s in town for a conference. The markets were pretty cool, some good stuff and a lot of the usual market fare - but the food is fantastic. A massive amount of choice including some authentic Indonesian/Malay street cuisine - I ate myself stupid, starting with some fried prawn dumplings and spring rolls, a mango lassi as a palette cleanser, then a nasi lemak (Eva, this one’s for you!).

While Matt and Bec headed straight to Darwin from Flora River, Jane and I detoured via the Douglas Daly hot springs (magic) and Litchfield National Park (ok - nice, but close to Darwin and so a bit touristy).

We stopped off for a swim and lunch at the old Victoria River crossing, on the way from Keep River NP to Flora River NP - of course, Jane was straight into the water for a dip.

Flora River National Park is a bit off the beaten track (if the road to Darwin is the beaten track), but well worth it. Very lush vegetation, a nice camping area and apparently good fishing. We caught nothing, but that’s par for the course.