The final Darwin Blog!

Antony & Matt went fishing on a Charter (they had to be at the docks at 5.20am!). The got fed a hot breakfast, morning tea, smorgesboard lunch & afternoon tea, oh, and they fished! :) They both caught huge Spanish mackeral, and Antony had the biggest catch of the day. They came home with 3 shopping bags full of fish, already scaled & filleted by the deckhand, can you tell they had a hard day....LOL

While the big boys were fishing, Alex and i went fish feeding! At a place called Aquascene on the waters edge of Doctors Gully Bay, at high tide fish of all shapes and sizes come up to be fed. There are tiny tiddles, good sized mullet & very large (1-1.5m) Milk Fish. You can either be in the water or out of it, we were in the water of course, fish swimming around our legs and taking food out of our hands. At one stage i was trying to multi-task & hold Alex, my handbag & take a photo with my phone. I almost dropped all three. i was lucky as a lovely guy & his girlfriend offered to hold Alex while i took photos, i almost had a very wet son & no phone or photos!

Darwin continued....again.... :)

The sunsets in Darwin are amazing, and we had the priviledge of having a fantastic view from the 4th floor of Matt & Kats apartment. You can actually see the tops of the city buildings lit up on a clear night. The colours are incredible, pinks, purples, oranges, reds, and sometimes the sky was cloudy the sun itself was red!

on

Darwin continued...

Other things we did in Darwin were visit the wave pool, which is so much fun. If you have been to wet'n'wild then it is like that, but better! 38 different wave formations so you never get bored or know what is coming next. Alex was a bit dubious at first and sat with Antony in a blow up ring, but by the 2nd time we went Alex was riding the boogy boards in!

We also visited the Chinese temple, went to the opening concert of the Darwin Fetsival, went to the Mindil Markets, played at the FREE waterslide park, that had kids & adults slides, a kids playground & a lagoon pool.

With our friends we went to Litchfield National Park, about 1 hour out of Darwin, where we saw the biggest termite mounds you can imagine, & where we swam in the most beautiful springs we have seen so far. They are pretty cold, but a very welcome cooling down in the mid-late 30's days. I very much recommend anyone up this way to go to Wangi falls, Bulli Springs & Florence fall, it is truly spectacular, but go in dry seaqson, wet season can mean the waterfall are running so hard you can't actually get to the swimming holes!

DARWIN!!!!

So after Katherine stay #1 is Darwin. Here we were very lucky to be staying with some awesome friends from my (Lauren's) Rosny College days! They live about 20mins South of Darwin City.

We had 2 weeks in Darwin so this might take a couple of posts :)

Our 1st darwin experience was the annual Beer can regatta, where locals built boats out of cans and attempted to race them along the shoreline. It is one of the funniest things you will ever see, some of the boast survive, a lot of them don't. There are crashes and sabotage, and only a few make it over the finish line. There is even a kids race where the boats have to be made out of soft drink cans! This is actually the only day of the year you can safely be in these waters, as they are croc infested, and i don't mean the small, freshwater kind, i mean the huge, angry salties! But from early in the morning motor boats & jetskis are on the water scaring them away, & a helicopter flys over every now and then to watch out for the snappy creatures. The water is so warm. According to reports, approx 16000 people showed up to the regatta at various points during the day.

There isn't just boat racing, there are sandcastle comps, kayak races, tug-of-wars etc. It is a whole day of fun!

Katherine - stay #1

I am writing this at 1.30am (3.30am EST) so please ignore any spelling/grammer mistakes :)

As we knew we would be coming back through Katherine on our way out West, we decided just to spend this few days relaxing and not doing a whole heap of touristy stuff. We stayed at the Manbulloo Homestead which is about 9km out of the town, just above the banks of the Katherine river. It was lovely and peaceful, shaded with beautiful big trees, clean amenities, very friendly staff.

We went into town a couple of times, which is basically one main road (the highway), and just a few smaller streets. There are some pretty cool shops for clothes & souveniers, and also some major shops like woolies & Target Country. There are a lot of Aborigines that just seem to hang around on the pavements and in front of the shops, trying to get some shade, but as far as we could tell this didn't phase anyone apart from one shop keeper who politelt but firmly told a family to stop loitering around )she told me after they left they had been sitting on her outdoor setting she had for sale for a couple of hours!

We also experience Northern territory Alcohol laws. Bottle shops not open until 2pm & having to hand over your drivers licence so they can put you in the data base and track how much alcohol you buy (i don't think the 6 pack we bought made us look very suspicious :P)

We walked along the beautiful Katherine river, where we found some beautiful Jasper rock (google it), and saw croc footprints and tail dragmarks. We also found some ochre that we did Rock paintings/drawings with. We also nealry got bowled over by a small tree brach falling from the sky! We looked up and saw a Cockatoo gnawing at the branches and figured he threw it at us, Alex thought this was hilarious!

In usual Alex style he made friends with everybody at Manbulloo, including Jono, one of the resident staff, who took him for rides on his 4 wheeler into the cow paddocks & to see the homestead helicopters! Even the boss/owner of manbullo fell under Alex's spell and drove him around in his golf buggy a couple of times. Needless to say Alex loved this van park.

The only other real thing we did that was touristy on this stay, was spend some time in the beautiful, natural warm springs, just a couple of KM's out of town. These have been made people freindly by adding stairs and rails, and also & wheelchair ramp. The water is crystal clear, and the little water fall made a great waterslide! However, if there is orange tape across the gate, or a suspicious looking cage in the water i wouldn't swim there if i were you.....snap snap!