Darwin

We extended last weekend with a couple of leave days and made another excursion to outback Australia. This time to Darwin, the capitol of the Northern Territory. Although NT constitutes about a fifth of Australia's total area only 1 percent of the population live here. There's plenty of space you could say. To get to Darwin you fly and the flight takes 4 hours. Yes, Australia is enormously big!

If I should summarise the stay in one word that word is HOT. It's incredibly hot up there. We had 33-35 degrees in Darwin city and a couple of degrees more on the trip to Litchfield National Park. Still this is the dry season and the worst is yet to come although we already felt like walking around in a steam sauna.

Darwin is known for having beautiful red sunsets and heaps of crocodiles. We're now not talking about lame american Alligators but Salt Water Crocs known to be the biggest and most aggressive in the world. In fact you can not swim anywhere up there without the area first being crocodile secured. During our stay in Aussie one person has been killed by a croc so it happens now and then.

So one of the days we went for a full day tour to Litchfield including Croc cruise on Adelaide river. It was all amazing. Stops at local outback pubs, swimming under waterfall, swimming in rock pools and studying gigantic termite mounds.
But the highlight was still the crocodile cruise. Each croc has it's own territory so every 25 meters there was a new one. They come immediately when they here splash in the water so you realise you wouldn't live many minutes if falling into the water.

The other days in Darwin we did a Harbour sunset cruise, walked the city and visited the Mindil beach sunset market. The sunsets are nice even if us as Gothenburgers are quite used to beautiful sunsets.
Darwin was completely destroyed by the Japanese during WW2 because it supplied fuel to the allied troups in Asia. Hence everything is built up after 1945 so it's a young city architecture wise. If you're interested in war history there is plenty to see but we skipped that part.

So would I recommend a trip to Darwin? Well the city in itself is not spectacular and it's extremely hot all year around but it's a different piece of the Australian puzzle that is worth to discover. Actually not to many of my Aussie friends have been there.

A local hero at an outback bar. Beer and a paper, what more do you need for breakfast?

You see a lot of road trains up here, max length is 53,5 m!

Swimming in a rock pool. Looks cold but is definitely not!

Wangi falls. You can swim into the waterfall

Yes, the sunsets are beauitiful!

 Cheers!

Country trip continued

Ok, so after the first day's adventure we headed of for Bunya Mountains, but first some words about Dalby. We have now experienced about about ten different small towns ( ca 10 000 inhabitants) in Australia and what strikes you is how similar they are. Dalby is a very good example. Streets are very broad in general and the main city center street is broad with 45 degree angle parking along the sides. In some corner you always find a "hotel" which is not a place where you sleep but a place where you have steak and beer. You also always find a little shopping center where the big food chains, Woolworths and Coles are dominating. Dalby is situated in a agricultural area surrounded by giant fields. A small river is floating through Dalby and in general the town feels quite wealthy. A quite nice place but unfortunately far from everywhere...

Dalby CBD

Dalby












So between Dalby and Kingaroy is Bunya Mountains, a national park with highest peak about 1100m above sea level. The area is most known for the big Bunya pines and a rich bird life. A popular place for campers and bush walkers. A nice place, well worth a visit, but frankly there are other national parks closer to Brissie offering same or better experiences.


Next place for staying was Kingaroy, the peanut capital of Australia. The main attraction here are the big peanut silos in the middle of the town and a local vendor called peanut van selling the nuts from a little stall in a corner. Don't know if peanuts are being outcompeted by cashew and other nuts but the general impression was that the town is closing down. Lots of empty premises, no place to eat except for Macca's and KFC and we were almost alone at the motel.
However they had a small museum with the story about the peanuts and quite a lot of old peanut farming machines which was quite interesting for a farmer boy like me.

The last morning I woke up early and decided to go for a morning walk on my own. The rain was hanging in the air but still it was a nice morning and I saw some nice birds like cockatoos and lorikeets. Then, while walking through a park I saw him, high up in a stand alone tree. Mr Magpie! I actually hesitated for a moment, thinking is it safe to pass but then thought I was quite far away from the tree so walked on. 10m past the tree he hit my back head from the left, bang! Ouch! I screamed "bloody bird" and started walking faster. Bang! strike number two from exactly same angle and now I started running. Although now maybe 50m away bang, there was strike number three. Kept running and when I finally stopped I realised I was bleeding from my left ear. I won't laugh at the swooping bird alert signs again!

Back to the motel for breakfast and then it started raining and it continued for the whole day. We visited a local winery and then made the 4 hour drive home in one go. An interesting thing at the winery. While we were tasting the wines a small group came in. They were not interested in any tasting but just bought two 25 litres plastic containers of the local port wine. I'm still wondering, what would anyone use 50l of port for? But since they actually sell it in those containers I guess it's not unusual.

Cheers

 Kingaroy with peanut silos in background

Kingaroy street view

A Bunya Wallaby

Country trip with wilderness

Last weekend was a long weekend in Queensland due to that the queens birthday was celebrated on Monday. No her actual birthday is not that day but since there are no public holiday during the second half of the year the Queenslanders have decided to celebrate in October! Hmm
Anyway, we decided to use the extra day to do a roadtrip to the metropolitan cities, sorry, towns of Dalby and Kingaroy, about 4 hours from Brisbane.
The intention was to see some typical small cities and also encounter some wildlife. It actually became a little bit too much of the latter which I will come back to. We also had the aim of seeing the southern hemisphere stars from a dark spot.
The journey started around 10am on Saturday and our first stop was in Toowoomba for lunch. Toowomba i a quite big and very green city about two hours from Brisbane. It's called the garden city and well worth a visit. However we were aiming for the small ones so continued straight after lunch. Two hours later we entered Dalby. This town has actually got its name from immigrants from Isle of Man between UK and Ireland who in their turn got that name from Swedish Vikings! Felt like coming home...  :)

Since it wasn't really time to check in at the Tourist park cabin we drove on to Lake Broadwater national park, aiming for a nice bird watching trail. We easily found the car park, turned off the engine and opened the doors. And everything turned dark...  What happens? What is this? The car was totally filled with mosquitoes in two seconds. Bloody Hell, what do we do? We had seen a Kangaroo mob 100 m before we stopped so we decided we at least need to take some pictures before leaving.
Probably the most stupid decision taken this year. We were literally covered by mosquitoes during the five minutes photo session. I counted 30 bites on my body that night. Luckily the kangaroos were at least willing photo models.

On the way back we saw three black snakes, almost driving over one of them. Research showed that red bellied black snakes are common in the area so that's our guess although they didn't introduce themselves properly. Yes, of course they're deadly!

Back in Dalby we found our cabin and then had a Chinese Smorgasbord. Yes you read it correctly. Chinese Smorgasbord, funny crossover kitchen. For the non swedish speakers, smorgasbord is originally a swedish word literally meaning "sandwich table" and normally a buffet of light cold dishes and bread. It's said to be one of only two swedish words in official english. The other is ombudsman.
After the meal it was dark so we just drove 10 minutes out in the middle of nowhere to watch the stars. Really beautiful and so worth it. A good nights sleep and then off to Bunya Mountains and Kingaroy
To be continued