Our first night of having our own beds in a campervan was met with an early rise as we were doing an 8:00am boat tour of the nearby Geikie Gorge. The boat tour provided us with some beautiful surroundings and photo opportunities galore. As we traversed the Fitzroy River on our boat, we managed to see lots of freshwater crocodiles resting on the banks and a large abundance of native birdlife (I sound like a nature nerd, yes I know). Add into this the fact that you were surrounded by rock walls hundreds of feet high on either side of you and you have the recipe for some great morning scenery. One of the craziest things about the far north of Australia is that for half of the year everything is flooded. In a pavilion they had markers indicating how high the flood waters rose to each year. Suffice to say that some years it rose over fifteen feet. In the rivers and such, the water levels can rise by substantially more and this naturally leads to no one being in the area for large chunks of the year. Following the tour, we hit the road again and promptly almost hit the largest lizard I have even seen. We also had some close encounters with wallabies (small kangaroos) and frequently saw cattle and horses grazing freely by the sides of the road. Apparently up here most farmers don’t believe in fences as they have cattle farms that are millions of square acres (no joke!). Naturally, this leads to the occasional cow ending up as road kill. I guess if you are after cheap steaks this is definitely the way to go. After arriving into the happening town on Kununurra that night, I concluded that the stone-chip I had picked up that day on the windshield would need to be addressed the following day as I did not have accident insurance on the vehicle. I was afraid/knew I would have to buy a new windshield, which on a van that size would probably cost as much as I had remaining in my bank account!
Arising on Thursday morning, I had one thing and one thing only on my mind, strippers. Actually I had my windshield on my mind and where to get it fixed. I ended up finding a joint in the town we were in that would do it for $80 that afternoon. Seeing as how the girlfriend and I had some time to kill before the windshield repair job, we went out of town to check out some place called the Zebra Rock Gallery. In short, we thought it was going to be the spot where we can see the zebra rocks, which are these naturally occurring rocks that not surprisingly had a zebra-like pattern. Turns out, the actual site (and only site place in the world to view them) was a few hundred kilometres away and was only visible for a couple weeks of the year when the tides were right. So, Leeanna and I had to settle for looking at the many inane objects they made using the zebra rocks. The highlight though was definitely getting the slice of bread they give you with your one dollar admission fee and feeding it to the hundreds of catfish in the lake. Yes, it was that exciting of a place. With our riveting morning behind us, we took our vehicle to get the stone chip fixed and I hoped they wouldn’t give me any hassle as it was not my vehicle and I am pretty sure you are not allowed to operate on fleet vehicles unless the company says so. Luckily, no one batted an eye and the chip was fixed with half an hour. We were on the road by about 2:00pm, although it gets dark at 6:00pm and this in turn led to a short day of driving. We stayed in some roadhouse town they call Victoria River, which left us with about five or six hours of driving the next day to get into Darwin.
Friday we had a pretty unspectacular six hour drive into the capital city of the Northern Territory, Darwin. While most of the capital cities in Australia have populations in the millions, Darwin has only about 100,000 people although this makes it far and away the largest city in the territory. In fact, it’s the only city in the territory. Just before arriving at the campervan depot, I smudged some mud over the spot on the windshield where the stone chip had been. There was also another stone chip in the corner of the window and I wasn’t sure if this was from me or somebody else. So, I gave that one an once-over with the mud and hoped no one would notice. Bizarrely, working at the campervan place was a dude named Max who used to work at the restaurant beside mine in Melbourne. He ended up being the guy who took care of my vehicle inspection and paperwork and he didn’t pick-up on the stone chips. I was home free! Our hostel turned out to be pretty average (Banyan View Lodge [6/10]), so with that in mind, we dropped off our bags, got showered up, and headed out for dinner. Cuisine that night came from a place known as Mitchelli’s Pizza that claimed to have the best pizza in Darwin. Seems to me to be a lot like claiming to have the best ice skating rink in rural Africa. Competition minimal. After dinner, we went to a couple of different local bars for some beverages and to watch the World Cup. Not surprisingly, all of the bars were just rammed with testosterone as the V8s (Australia’s version of NASCAR) were in town for the weekend. As you can imagine, drunk, ignorant, middle-age men were the standard for the weekend. I, unlike most people in the city that weekend behaved myself though and when we went back to the hostel we chilled out and watched some more World Cup games in the common area. Turns out an older gentleman (roughly 70ish) staying in the hostel took exception to us watching television at 1:00am and stormed out of his room in his tighty-whiteys and proceeded to tell us (in a very rude, profane way) to keep it quiet. Thinking that we were quiet enough and his outfit hilarious, the six or so of us watching television had a good laugh and went back to the boob-tube. Well, low and behold, a minute later the old fucker came storming out of his room again, this time with a mouth full of curse words and a porcelain mug. In short time, he whipped the mug at the wall over our heads, which smashed into a million pieces all over us. Mr. Underpants stormed out of the room, we were all in shock/laughing, and the hostel was going to have to find some new wall decorations. Best moment of the week, hands down!
After hiding in our rooms for fear that the crazy old man might throw some mugs at us, we eventually found our way out and into the city. After strolling the whole distance on Mitchell Street (one main street in Darwin, pretty uneventful) we made our way to the waterfront precinct. From there, we headed over to the World War II oil storage tunnels, which are basically exactly what they sound like, huge oil tunnels about fifteen feet tall and fifteen feet wide that run underneath the city. I don’t think they were ever used very much, but are an interesting attraction nonetheless. That night after dinner, we made our way back to the waterfront area, this time to catch a movie under the stars at Deckchair Cinema. Just like in Broome, Darwin has an old movie theatre that was all outdoors. While these wouldn’t fly too well in Canada, they are a great idea in a place like Darwin, where it “cools down” to 30°C in the winter! The film showing that night was “The Men Who Stare At Goats” with George Clooney and Jeff Bridges. Good to see a not-so-serious war film for once. Brings back fond memories of my childhood and my Dad forcing me to watch M*A*S*H* every night. Following the movie, the girlfriend and I bee-lined it for the pub to catch Australia’s second game of the World Cup. They had been thrashed in their first game 4-0 by Germany; so many people had already given up on the Socceroos. Australia ended up tying Ghana 1-1, which pretty much all but eliminates them from progressing forward in the tournament. To combat this, we drowned our sorrows in a few jugs of beer, which if all went according to plan would also help in my sleeping that night.
As most of the water around Darwin is not safe to swim in due to saltwater crocodiles and box jellyfish, the fine people of Darwin decided to build a wave pool in their waterfront precinct. Naturally Leeanna and I (ok, mostly me) wanted to splash about with all the kids and that is exactly what we did on Sunday. After rising rather late in the morning, we made our way down to the wave pool and proceeded to splish and splash all the live long day with our inner tubes. I did think about taking a dump in the wave pool to scare off some of the kids, but then decided that this might be a little cruel. This was really the only thing we did of any interest on Sunday, as I suspect we are starting to get a little “touristed” out and tired of constantly beating the traveller’s trail.
In totally unrelated news, Leeanna and I both appeared to have gotten attacked by either bed bugs, sand flies, or some other mysterious creature. We have both been itching like crazy for over a week now and our extremities are covered in bites. This in turn has led to some pretty sleepless nights at times and the anti-histamines we picked up seem to be only helping mildly. In conclusion, I would just like to state that I am in fact very itchy and hate all forms of flying bugs. Fuck nature.
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