Around the World - The 34th Stop, Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia
As I had never been in Darwin, we decided to pay a short 6 nights visit there while we were staying in Fremantle, Western Australia. Darwin is the capital city of the sparsely populated Northern Territory, with a population of approximately 130,000. It is said to be dynamic, different, diverse and Australia's most cosmopolitan city, as being home to people from more than 60 nationalities and 70 different ethnic backgrounds. Well, different it was, but not sure how dynamic. For me it felt more like time had stopped and people weren’t hurrying anywhere - except maybe to bars. And on the day we arrived, no one was really going anywhere, because Darwin was basically shut down due to a major power blackout. The power cut had hit the whole of the city, forcing offices, schools, stores, restaurants etc. to close, and affected traffic as also traffic lights were knocked out. Power was eventually restored more than 12 hours after the outage began. We were lucky to enjoy only those few last hours, and a very very humid hotel room.
Darwin has a tropical climate and a wet season period with most rain falling between December and March. During this time there can be high intensity thunderstorms, providing often also spectacular lightning displays. As we visited Darwin in March, we also got to enjoy few smaller storms, as well as the really hot and humid weather. I love the tropical lifestyle but must admit it was too hot (or sweaty) even for me.
Usually the main thing to do while in Darwin is to visit the Australia’s largest national park, the Kakadu National Park, located 240 km east of the city. Due to the wet season (and travelling with two small kids), we decided to skip this experience and chose few other ‘famous’ attractions, more suitable for our small ones. The Crocosaurus Cove with a range of crocodiles and the largest exhibition of Australian reptiles was indeed a huge success (even though we were not those crazy ones to swim with the crocodiles in 'the Cage of Death’). After having fed the crocodiles the fish feeding sanctuary Aquascene probably was not as exiting but much fun also. Well, no matter what kind of animals, joy is guaranteed with my little animal hunters. The heat in Darwin didn’t seem to bother too much either my Miss Darwin nor my Mister Jr Darwin.