Dizzy In Oz: 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.