Australia 2019 – Day 42 – Darwin

After leaving the airport at 2 am in my rental car I stopped in the first quiet neighborhood I saw and took a long nap. Fortunately I rented a new Mitsubishi that reclines completely, so I was quite comfortable. At around 6 am I got up and drove to downtown Darwin, where I got early-bird parking at a parking structure. I am going to leave the car here, because Thrifty and the Northern Territories played me a dirty game and gave me a limit of 100 km free per day, after which they will charge me AUS$ 0.35 per kilometer. Imagine that, 100 km in Australia! Why, you can easily burn that going to the Men’s Shed. [Every small town in Australia has a Men’s Shed, which looks like a plain farm shed, but is where the bar is located.]

Darwin was settled in the early 1800’s, largely because the Brits didn’t want the French or the Dutch to get a foothold on their new sandbox. At the beginning it was but a cattle post where ranchers shamelessly dispossessed the native inhabitants of their land. In 1838, the surveyor of the 3^rd trip of The Beagle renamed the settlement Darwin, in honor of the naturalist that had accompanied the 2^nd trip of The Beagle in 1831-1836.

I limited my on-foot explorations to the touristy downtown, and can tell you that it is perfectly geared to receive hordes of tourists. Backpackers are very welcome, so you have lots of young people congregating around the pools of their hostels, no doubt recovering from a wild night in one of the many night clubs found in this area. In the morning the best the tourist can do is walk the waterfront. Darwin sits along the shore of a ria bay, formed by the rise of sea level into the stream valleys of a coastal watershed. If it had been a large watershed there would be one or more rivers feeding into the bay and then I could call it an estuary; but no, there is no significant river so it is just a bay. The city is underlain by a Cretaceous porcelanite (a quartz siltstone), not unlike that of the Miocene Monterey Formation in California.

World War II buffs would have many sites to visit since Darwin was bombed by the Japanese, and afterward was the headquarters of many air squads of the Allies. The modern citizen is likely to admire, in the distance, the modern facilities built to cool and liquefy natural gas being extracted from the Timor Sea to the west, as well as a supermodern loading facility for giant LNG ships.

I also spent lots and lots of money making reservations to go tomorrow to Kakadu National Park, which will include a fast air-boat ride in the Corroboree Billabong (i.e., a slough that is part of the estuary of the Adelaide River), a night lodging in the park (expensive!), and a cruise along the East Alligator River. I give you one guess as to what animal I might see in this cruise. . . .  Wrong! Alligators are only found in Latin America and the shores of the Gulf of Mexico. The misname of this particular river was the fault of a rooky biologist who sighted the animals from the surveying vessel and shouted: “Alligators, alligators!”

As I am writing this entry I realize I have miscalculated, and that I will have one more day in Darwin beyond the two I am spending in the Kakadu National Park. Hmm … this is where the 100 km per day is really going to put a cramp in my style.