Camping cost: $1536.73 Sites: 40 Average: $38.42

peteg's blog - travels - NT 2003 08 - 2003 08 14 Darwin

/travels/NT-2003-08 | Link

This is all written retrospectively, from circa mid-October to December in Göteborg, Sweden.

I wanted to see either or both of the Great Barrier Reef or the outback before heading off to Sweden; I'm a bit jack of tourists and foreign students having seen more of my country than I had. In the end I only got organised enough to trip from Darwin to Alice Springs, and swing by the Rock.

I had to get up before dawn in order to catch QF81 at 8:50am, to Darwin via Adelaide. The black and white image of the Coorong (the mouth of the River Murray) in the transit lounge at Adelaide Airport was amazing; I definitely want to head back and check it out properly. (I stole this image from a government webpage which strangely vanished soon after my initial visit.)

On the flight up to Darwin I was sitting next to a TAFE administrator who was doing her stoical best in the face of massive funding cuts by the Feds.

As expected, Ann(i)e's sister Karen was still at work. I had intended to go to the fish feeding at Doctor's Gully, but was too late and so headed into town in search of coffee and shade. We met up right in the middle, near the Maccas (where else). Karen was keen to see "Mavis goes to East Timor" at the Darwin Entertainment Centre later in the night, and in the meantime watch the sun set and grab some food at the Mendal Beach markets with the rest of the itinerant population of Darwin.

The markets are something else. They have the standard kind of food stalls you'll find at any outdoorsy-market-type thing, and such uniquely N.T. ones as the road kill one with the slogan "You kill it, We grill it". They were selling <insert random wildlife here>-sausages, and of course you've no idea what's in those.