Darwin

Monday 20th July 2009
The night at Batchelor was quite warm and we are back to using only sheets. We packed up in the not so hot morning hours and hit the road around 9am. The trip to Darwin was short and quick, just on an hour and we reached the Free Spirit Resort Caravan Park. There are hundreds of caravans in this big park and there was a queue at the gate when we arrived. The park has three swimming pools and numerous amenities. Not really my preference of parks but that's what it's like close to the big smoke. The park is in Pinelands, a suburb around 20km from Darwin CBD.
Before we drove into the caravan park we called in to see the Caravan Dealer across the road to see if we could get new springs for our annex. He had some springs on order but everything in NT is somewhat slower than the rest of Australia so it takes 7 days to get products from the East Coast delivered to Darwin.
We have heard that NT stands for "Not Today, Not Tomorrow, Not on Tuesday and Not on Thursday", and they are not joking! Everything up hear is happening a half speed or slower, even the checkout chicks at the supermarket are only going half the speed we are used to in NSW and VIC.
Setting up the caravan in the heat was rather exhausting and I worked up a big sweat in the process. I can see why they work only at half speed up here.
The first thing that we noticed was the very loud roar of the Air Force fighter jets taking off from the Darwin Airbase just up the road. They are so noisy that they interrupt conversations between people on the ground. After about 10 of the noise makers took off, we found out that the defence forces are currently conducting an exercise and this noisy air traffic is only intermittent - what a relief.
Darwin is built around its big airport, so no matter where you are there are always aeroplanes overhead.
We took a drive into Darwin and booked a fishing charter for Thursday at the tackle shop up the road. In Darwin CBD we called into the visitor information centre before heading North to a couple of camping and fishing shops - the BCF shop up here is much much bigger than the Albury shop!
The next stop was the big shopping centre at Casuarina - this place is a real metropolitan shopping centre, much larger than anything we have in Albury Wodonga. We stocked up on food supplies as it has been well over a week since our last decent food supply in Kunanurra.
Dinner and a bit of computer work bring the day to an end and we are already looking forward to exploring this interesting place in more detail.