Day 1, April 25, Arrival in Darwin

The flight with Singapore Airlines from Frankfurt was pleasant. Departure at 12:15, after 12.5 hours in Singapore, with a 1.5-hour layover there, and then on to Darwin, a flight of just under 5 hours. To quickly adjust to the time difference, we slept on the first, but not on the second flight.

After just under 20 hours, we arrived punctually in Darwin at 14:45 local time. It’s a small airport since Darwin has only about 125,000 inhabitants, even though it is the capital of the Northern Territory. This is larger than Germany, but consists mostly of desert or tropical savannah, with a total population of only 250,000.

I passed through the automatic passport control quickly, and our luggage arrived swiftly as well, but not Lindelani. She had queued at the non-automatic passport control, but was then sent by an officer to the automatic one, where it didn’t work with her South African passport, and then she had to stand all the way back and came out last!

At the airport, there was no good ATM, so we took an Uber to the hotel, the Vibe Hotel on the waterfront, right by the sea. On the way, we stopped at a Drive Through Bottle Shop, where I bought beer since tomorrow was Sunday. A bit complicated for me, not knowing the process, and I ended up with double what I planned, but whatever.

At the hotel, it turned out my booking was incorrect. After our camper had been canceled in November and I had to book a new one, I overlooked rebooking the hotel: it was only booked for tomorrow. After some back and forth, it worked out, even without an extra charge.

The room was right at the end of the hall, and with all the luggage, including 2x24 cans of beer, I had to walk twice. In the room, I quickly changed from long pants to shorts, and then we were off. Since we wanted to see something before sunset, and it was already 17:00.

Darwin is tropical hot, every day 32 degrees, and has high humidity. We walked past the restaurants on the waterfront and then took an Uber to a local nature reserve, the East Point Reserve, just about 10 minutes away. Through a sparse forest, we walked the Mangrove Board Walk, a path to and then on bridges into the mangroves. We saw many crabs and small mudskippers.

Afterwards, we strolled a bit more in the reserve and found a large group, a mob, of agile wallabies near the airstrip. It was nice to see the first kangaroos just a few hours after our arrival in Australia!

We enjoyed the sunset at the beach, then headed back to the city, and for dinner, we had crocodile burgers (meat from saltwater crocodiles raised for leather production), fish, and lamb. Without any jet lag, we went to bed at 22:00 and fell asleep well.