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Day 42
I can now officially say that I’ve slept in an airport. And as airports go, Singapore isn’t a bad choice. The annoying thing was that the really nice comfy chairs (the ones in that lounge I mentioned ages ago) were in the transit area, which you can’t get to without checking in. And you can’t check in until two hours prior to departure. So we went to the food court and had some snacks, and watched BBC world on the TVs overhead. They also had a pool table so we played a few games on that too. This left us with about four hours to kill until the earliest we could possibly be allowed to check in. I found a kid’s play area, one of the ones with soft rubber on the floor, and slept there – David chose to ‘roam the airport’.
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Day 41
Check out time at our hostel is officially 9am, so having woken up at 9:06am, I packed leisurely, accepting the inevitable late-checkout fee. As it turned out, I avoided the fee anyway, so that was lucky.
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Day 40
On waking up, I discovered that I had just under 40 mosquito bites. David and John were both virtually unscathed, so I came to the inescapable conclusion that I must be very tasty indeed. We had to be up at 5:00am, so that we could leave by 6. Thus the entire getting up and having breakfast was conducted, very unnaturally, in the darkness. We switched to a four wheel drive bus (borderline truck, actually) for the trip to Jim Jim and Twin Falls Waterfalls. Jim Jim Falls is accessible via a walking track, and only in the dry season. In the wet season, believe it or not, the only way to get there is by helicopter. Another feature of Jim Jim peculiar to the dry season, is that it is dry – the waterfall is not in flow. Despite this, it is still an amazing sight, especially at this time of the morning.
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Day 39
The Kakadu is for Darwin what the Great Barrier Reef is for Cairns – a must see. We departed early, taking an annoying amount of time to pick up everyone else booked on the tour, and then headed off to the park. We were in a small bus, with a group of 17, none of whom said anything at all, as far as I could make out, for the 1½ hour drive to our first stop. This was simply because our tour guide failed to introduce everybody.
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Day 38
Deirdre had given me the name of a friend in Darwin who owned a travel agency in the Mall, so I made this my target for the morning. David was whizzing around the place on his scooter, the novelty value of which had not yet worn off, and John had decided to hire a moped and explore a bit further out of town.
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Day 37
For our first full day in Darwin, we split up to explore our various interests. David headed off to hire a bike, but with the temperature already heading for the hotter side of 30º, and humidity so high I felt I was walking through a bowl of soup, I was definitely not in any shape to handle such strenuous excesses. While John chose the powered option and hired a 50cc buggy, I decided to check out the Aviation museum.
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Day 36
Taking a flight in a hot air balloon had been on my list of things to do for a long time, and we were finally going for a flight. In fact, this was to prove quite a busy day for flying, since we were scheduled to take the more conventional form of air transport to Darwin later in the day.
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Day 35
Another late start allowed us a lie-in. John and David decided to hire bikes and ride “to the middle of nowhere and back again”. But with a guidebook full of places to go, I decided to visit the Old Ghan Train Museum.
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Day 34
After the previous day’s long coach journey, it was a relief not to have to get up early. The problem with this, or course, is that all the good restaurants and cafes have stopped serving breakfast. Fortunately, after a brief wander down the Todd Mall, I found an excellent café that served breakfast all day.
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Day 33
This day was never going to start well. At precisely 4am, all the alarms I had set began to go off, which had absolutely no effect on me but brought David and John to startled awakeness, and I was subsequently aroused by a bottle of shower gel on a ballistic trajectory from David’s bunk. After stumbling through packing, attempting to be as quiet as possible and failing, I found myself in front of the reception area at quarter to five, feeling very sorry for myself. My mood was brightened moments later when I found out that there was someone having a worse morning than me. Her name was Tammy, and her backpack had broken while packing that morning.