The Ghan Expedition – Darwin in the Dry Season

Our hotel is a building which could have been kindly described as an architectural disaster even when it was built back in the 1980s. It has not weathered the tropical environment very well, maintenance apparently has ceased several years back and it is now very tired. Our room has two levels with the bed up a flight of stairs . As the head of the stairs arrives near the foot of the bed, night time expeditions take on certain element of risk

We headed out around 10am to catch the Hop on Hop off bus. We had an interesting ride around Darwin’s environs. It is unrecognisable from the Darwin I knew 50 years back. One shot l thought you might like. This is called the Duckpond and is where the fishing fleet docks.

We got off the bus at Cullen Bay where we planned to have lunch. We had lunched here 10 years back and had been really impressed. Unfortunately, something, I assume we can safely blame Covid, had sent almost all of the restaurants and shops there to the wall. There only seemed to be one restaurant operating and that one only just. It was all very depressing.

So we fed the fish and Jeanette patted the brass crocodile and we waited for the hop on bus to arrive and beam us out of there. This it duly did. We boarded the bus but when we went upstairs we noted some of the seats had been wet by rain so we retreated downstairs. At the next stop a large group got on and headed upstairs, the bus moved off then the rain hit us. At the next stop all the upstairs lot came down looking like drowned rats. The rain continued to grow in intensity till the water was starting to come through the floor above us in increasing quantity.

We abandoned our sinking bus at the Waterfront precinct , sprinted through about 5 yards of torrential downpour to the verandah that ran around one side of the precinct, found a nice restaurant and settled down to lunch and to wait out the storm which lasted around two hours.

After around two hours the rain stopped, the sun came out and the humidity just went off the scale. We walked back to our hotel. Unfortunately this route took us past Paspaly pearls and it proved a little difficult to persuade Jeanette to keep walking.

At 5pm got picked up for an evening dinner cruise on the Harbour. The water was like a millpond and the cruise operator was very efficient with great staff. As we set off on the cruise we passed by a Royal Navy River Class patrol boat , the HMS Tamar. I doubt getting from England to Darwin in a vessel that size would have been all that easy.