Darwin Part 2

After a couple of days of free activities we booked in for a Jumping Crocodile Cruise on the Adelaide River. It is about half an hours drive from Darwin back towards Kakadu. It was great! You get very close to the crocs and there are so many to see. They dangle pieces of meat from enormous fishing rods and get the crocs to jump up and get it.




In the evening we went to the Mindil Beach Markets to watch the amazing sunset and check out all the market stalls. The kids spent ages at an animal farm which we couldn't understand since they are just the same in Melbourne!


The beautiful sunset at Mindil Beach.


The food at the market was great, we have missed Asian food and there was so much to choose from! The boys favorite stall was Mick's Whips and they have perfected their whip cracking and both want their own whips for their birthdays.

On Saturday night Michael took Jack and Tom to see the NT Thunder play a semi final at Marrara Stadium. The most exciting part for the boys was joining in a grid game at half time. Tommy even kicked a goal!






On Sunday morning there was a welcome home parade for the soldiers who just returned from Timor and Afghanistan. It was down one of the main streets in the city.












We checked out the Museum and Art Gallery where the highlight was seeing Sweetheart the 5.6m croc that was caught and accidentally drowned, then stuffed and put into the museum. Personally I would rather have him in the museum than swimming out in the wild!




The last thing we checked out in Darwin was the Military Museum at East Point. Not surprisingly the boys enjoyed spending the morning checking out all the guns. We all learnt more about the bombing during WW2 and discovered that there were 68 raids on Darwin and many more people were killed than we realised.









We had been waiting on some repairs to the caravan all morning and got back to the repairer to find that having told us that it would be done in 3-4 hours it would actually take 6 plus. To top it off they had left the caravan in the sun for 4 hours without plugging it in to power, meaning that everything in the fridge was warm. Not happy. Needless to say I told them not to bother in no uncertain terms, we hooked the van back up and left Darwin for Litchfield National Park.

Even though I left very angry towards caravan repairers, we really enjoyed Darwin. We would love to go back one day as there is plenty more to see. We loved buying boxes of mangoes for $8 which took the kids about 6 hours to get through and we loved the beautiful warm evenings, watching the sunset over the beaches. Onto the next adventure!