Car, Pool and Wharf Precinct

The coolest thing first: I am now the proud owner of my first car :D It all happened very quickly and now Andi and I have bought a car. Actually, we didn't think we would find something so quickly, but we were lucky. Here's the funny story:

We have been sporadically looking for cars on the internet or at the hostel bulletin board to get an idea of the offers and prices. Yesterday, Andi accidentally signed me up for the Darwin Backpackers group on Facebook (he thought he was signing up for himself), I just took a look and saw a post from a guy who wants to sell his 4-wheel-drive car. The post was only 20 minutes old and no one had commented "PM" yet, which would have meant that someone had already written him a private message. Because the price and other factors of the car also matched, I just wrote him a short message. He answered right away, we made an appointment for a viewing and test drive one hour later, and one hour later the purchase was sealed :D The guy was really nice (thank goodness he was German and could explain everything to us in a way we understood!), we could look at everything on the car, he answered all our questions, and the test drive in left-hand traffic also worked great (but it's a bit strange, especially that the turn signal has to be operated with the right hand. If you try to do it automatically with your left hand, the windshield wiper turns on^^). So we negotiated the price and after he had lowered it by 500 AU$ from the original price, everything was fine for us. Because we don't have an Australian bank account yet, but he really wanted to sell his car as soon as possible so he could fly to the east coast, he even paid us the fees we had to pay due to the withdrawals with a German credit card. This morning I signed the contract, he gave us all the papers and explained some details about the car again, and since then we have a Ford Escape XLT! Pretty cool :D Especially because the price was really cheap with the equivalent of 3,000 €, the odometer with almost 197,000 km is not high for Australian standards, and the car is also not that old with a year of construction 2001. Besides, it's a four-wheel-drive car that can also be driven on off-road routes in the national parks or in the red center. And instead of the two rear seats, you could put in a bed. And he also left us all sorts of camping equipment, such as a gas stove with gas bottles, a gasoline canister, a tent, pillows, camping chairs and table, cooking utensils, etc.

Next, the organizational things like changing the registration and getting extra insurance for damage to other cars will come. In a few weeks, the registration will also have to be renewed, which costs quite a lot of money. Dealing with all this paperwork is really confusing and time-consuming, so we are glad that we bought a car that is registered in Western Australia, because everything is easiest to handle there. But we will surely manage that as well!

By the way, I uploaded a photo in which I am seen with a REALLY big car, but they are quite normal in Darwin. Just to see the comparison with our car again, which is already relatively big :D

To celebrate the car purchase, we first treated ourselves to a round in the whirlpool. It's really relaxing!

And then we walked to the harbor. It's not far away from our hostel (like everything in Darwin). There are many restaurants, shops, and a man-made lagoon where you can swim because it is separated from the sea and there are no jellyfish. We walked along the water a bit and finally walked to Stokes Hill Wharf. From there, we had a great view of the city and the sunset. At the end of the wharf, there were also several restaurants and many people eating there. But we walked back and enjoyed the evening/night view of the lights on the water. Really beautiful!

In the hostel, we had dinner and now I'm writing the blog entry. For example, last night we played Uno with the other German couple (who, by the way, are called Matze and Karo) and played for 3 hours. It was really funny because we made a rule that the winner of each round gets to come up with a new rule. This resulted in some really funny things that made the game quite confusing but exciting. The last round alone took 40 minutes :D

By the way, in our hostel, there are more Germans or other foreigners again and not just Australians. They were probably only here for the weekend, made noise and partied, and then left again. It's good for us, they were sometimes so loud in the corridors at midnight, which was really not normal. Let's see if it will be the same next weekend...

That's it for now. Andi and I have our bank appointments tomorrow for the accounts, let's see if everything works out. And then we'll also assist Matze and Karo at a car viewing appointment, which will be in English and they are not sure if they understand everything correctly.

But now good night :)