I've been up to Darwin a few times now, and it's a really cool little city.
I had a mate, Limmy, who was doing a four-month stint up here as a physio. To farewell him we had a bit of a lads weekend in Darwin.
We drove up on Friday after work, but there will be no photos of our activities here. Needless to say it was a good night.
It was, however, very difficult to get up in time to make the 7am fishing charter we had booked. The only saving grace was that we knew they were going to have bacon and egg rolls for us on arrival... gold. It was a half day trip, just around Darwin harbour.
It was a slow start, and the other fellas were pulling them up in dribs and drabs while I looked on forlornly. But soon, it was on.
Now much to Limmy's disgust, I caught the biggest fish of the day. It was a beautiful snapper. But Limmy, being a little bit petty, decided to crop the photo. Okay, so it's not a monster or anything, but catching anything is fun.
I caught five I think in all, and the other fellas caught a fair few too. We were staying at a backpackers right in town which had a barbecue, and decided to cook up the fillets for tea. So while all the other backpackers were eating tinned soup and sausages, we cooked up fresh fish marinated in chilli and garlic, asian greens stir fried on the barbecue, which actually worked really well, and chips.
It was awesome.
One the way back we decided to go via Litchfield National Park, which is maybe 80 kilometres off the highway back to Katherine.
We went to Florence Falls, which is the closest attraction. You have to walk down a heap of steps to get there, but this is the view from the lookout at the top.
It was a beautiful spot to swim, and we managed to climb up under the waterfall. There was also a great ledge to jump off into the pool. Apparently that's a bit of a boy thing to do, but it's always so much fun!
We stopped quickly at the magnetic termite mounds on the way out. This photo doesn't show it too clearly, but they're only perhaps 10 or 20 centimetres thick, and they all line up almost exactly north to south. If you think about it, it's pretty freaky that termites know how to do that. But apparently it's about the direction of the wind in the valley that the termites live in, and this is the most aerodynamic way to build them. Pretty clever.
So all in all, a pretty darn good weekend.
