It was a weird feeling when we packed the tent for the last time for a while. Given that we camped for an estimated 25 nights in a row, Flo and I were mighty tired of packing up every morning. On the other hand, it has been our home for the last month and maybe even a bit longer. We will probably not use it through all of Asia as rooms are cheap enough to not bother with camping.
This little fellow lived in the tap
After packing and a short fright when I flushed a frog out of the tap onto my water bottle, we left Mary River National Park and headed for Darwin. For the first part of the route, Flo tried to read up on attractions along the road but then we both decided that we could do with half a day in a city and thus headed straight for Darwin.
The only stop we took afterwards was crossing the Adelaide River and seeing a giant jumping crocodile statue. It is at the place where all the “jumping crocodile tours” leave from.
The similarities…perplexing 😛
Arriving in Darwin at lunch time, we both enjoyed being in a city again. There is food everywhere and supermarkets with everything rather than a road side gas station that mainly stocks cans and tins. So we had a lovely lunch and were prepared to spend half a day while waiting for our hosts to come home when Flo checked his mails and we got the information that Tig was off work for the day and we could just drive to Coconut Grove right after lunch.
Celia and Tig’s house (it is more than a flat) is very tropical. No closed walls, slatted windows (it makes sense here) and one story up in the foliage of the palm trees. Getting out of our gear, we had a frantic hour or two. Flo started to organize shipping the bike and the information that we kept getting was quite different to what we got on the road. At some point the option was shipping today or waiting till October 23rd so we rushed around to maybe make it in a couple of hours. Luckily, all of this cleared up at some point and the cut off for the ship is now on Thursday as we had expected.
Tig gave Flo a ride to the motorbike shop to pick up all the parts that he had ordered and then we had a lovely afternoon/evening in the shade. Our hosts then invited us for dinner and cooked a delicious meal for us. We were joined by their flatmates Liz and her partner. It was Liz’s birthday so lovely Celia had bought champagne and we had a merry first night in Darwin.
