I had been here in about 1970 when I was roughnecking on an oil rig in the Timor Sea, pre cyclone Tracy. I had then come here quite a lot in the 1990’s when the company I worked for had the BHP contract, and about the only thing I had found then that was left after Tracy was the classic old world open air bar in the Darwin Hotel, complete with wicker arm chairs and ceiling fans (a la Raffles in Singapore), and the RAAF base !! This time, I recognised a few roads, but it has grown so much, and on asking a local, found that the old Darwin Hotel had been torn down some time ago and replaced with an new upmarket complex. Oh well – Reminds me that I am just an old fart getting past my use-by date !!
Anyway, we went down around the wharves that I DID
remember, and had a coffee on Stokes Hill Wharf (near where we used to load our
chemicals on the oil rig work boats !!) which is now all developed into
restaurants. Darwin Harbour was of
course bombed by the Japanese in WW II – In fact by the same carrier based
force that had attacked Pearl Harbour 10 weeks before, but they actually
dropped more bombs on Darwin than they did on Pearl Harbour. So quite a lot of history down there. After that, we went back up into town to
explore, but, apart from one street, it was pretty quiet, and the pedestrian
mall area was actually rather run down and sad. So once we had spent a couple of hours
exploring, and had got all the Kakadu information we needed from the
Information centre, we decided to go back down to the Wharf for lunch – I mean,
when in this part of the world, eat the local fish, right ? And that means Barramundi !!
So went back down to the wharf, and had delicious
Barramundi with some local calamari and a salad - Yummy. And very
relaxing sitting down there with the breeze.
It might be the cooler dry season here at the moment, but it is still 32
degrees or more !! After a leisurely
lunch, we decided to drive over to Mindil Beach for the evening markets – We
were a bit early, but parked in a shady spot and sat out on our chairs and had
a cup of tea ! Once the markets got
going at about 4.30 pm, we started wandering through them, with the crowds
rapidly building until by 6 pm, half an hour before sunset, they were pretty
busy. Food stalls galore, but many of
the stalls had the same fare that you find in many of the markets around
Australia nowadays. But there were just
enough different ones to make them interesting, and a few minor purchases were
made by Janet. As sunset approached, we
took our chairs and sat on the beach – But there was quite a lot of cloud and
it was evident it would be a bit of a fizzer, so we moved back up into the
markets and settled down to watch a fire juggler who had an excellent show, and
kept everyone (especially the kids) spellbound for an hour or so. We
then moved out quickly, and managed to get out of the enormous and very full
car park quite easily. We had decided to
try and get out of town towards Kakadu before finding a campsite, but this went
a bit wrong when all 3 cites we passed were full !!!! We ended up driving for
an hour or more to a place called Corroboree before we found a spot. We would have stopped in a layby but there
had been a lot of controlled burning beside the road in the last day or two,
and there were still a lot of hot spots burning, and we didn’t really fancy
finding ourselves surrounded by smoke or even fire at 3 am in the morning
!! So we literally parked up at the Corroboree
site, raised the pop top and went to bed !!
Pics here :- https://picasaweb.google.com/117739775480775657932/0038DarwinToCorroboree?authkey=Gv1sRgCKWJ0tjFl6Twdg#
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