Before arriving in Australia, I hadn't considered visiting the Top End but Caro pretty much threatened to disown me as a goddaughter if I didn't make it up there. It happened to be the best time of the year for visiting that part of the country - just after the wet season, when the parks are still lush and before they get ridiculously hot. However, in terms of tourism, it's only the beginning of the peak season, so it wouldn't be overly crowded.
So, from Sydney I flew to Darwin, where I had three days to kill before the tour I'd booked into set off.
My time in Darwin did not get off to a good start. I hated the hostel I'd booked into from the moment I walked into the door and the entire experience of staying there did little to challenge that initial reaction. Moreover, none of my bank cards were working and I hardly had any cash. Sorting that out was a saga in itself (I'll spare you the details) and, by the time I was able to head off to the Mindel Beach Sunset Market, the sun had already set. I got lost walking there in the dark. It was a terrible evening.
Though I never really took to Darwin as a whole, there were some excellent activities to keep me amused. The first thing I did was to visit the Supreme Court, where I'd heard there was a worthwhile mosaic. Indeed, there was. Once I was there, and I'm not sure what possessed me to do this, I sat in on one of the court sessions. I was the only spectator of a dispute between an ex-husband and wife over the financial settlement. Because the woman was representing herself, the judge kept on explaing what she could and couldn't do, as well as some of the legalese, which was very helpful for me too! Ultimately it felt somewhat too voyeuristic for my liking and I left before any verdict was announced.
Later that day I visited the Australian Pearling Exhibition, which I was enjoying before it become increasingly obvious that it was essentially one big ad for the Paspaley jewellery company. That evening, I got chatting to a guy at the hostel who had in his favour a striking physical resemblance to Brad Pitt. On the downside, personality and intelligence-wise, he turned out to be rather like said actor in 'Burn After Reading'.
The next day I spent six utterly engrossing hours at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory. They have an exceptionally fine collection of Aboriginal art and artefacts, an excellent natural history room full of Australia's weird and wonderful creatures, a moving exhibit on Cyclone Tracy, which had absolutely ravaged Darwin in 1974, a show of artworks by high school leavers, some of which were genuinelly super, a special show on crocidilians and, to top it off, a massive maritime gallery.
After all that there was little else I was inclined to do but sit in an air-conditioned cinema. Caro had strongly recommended that I see 'Samson and Delilah' (which since won an award at Cannes), set in a small aboriginal community in Central Australia. The story follows a young man and woman and the tagline is 'True Love'. I found it both beautiful and frustrating. Frustrating because there was almost no dialogue and I couldn't understand the central relationship. The more I later learnt about aboriginal customs, the more sense the film made. It was a fascinating insight into a culture I knew almost nothing about.
One of my Darwin highlights was a trip to the botanic gardens. It has been a dream of mine for the last 16 years, since we did a primary school project on trees, to visit the rainforest. That was coming soon (I'd planned a trip to the Daintree Rainforest in Far North Queensland). In the meantime, the rainforest loop in the Darwin gardens whet my appetite for it. There was also a self-guided tree walk, which took us to trees unlike any I'd seen before. My favourite was the cannon-ball tree, with its pink and yellow blossom and cannon-ball shaped seeds hanging stright off the trunk:
At the time, I wasn't massively happy in Darwin, but thinking back now over what I did there, it actually wasn't such a bad few days after all.
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