10th July - Darwin day - Parliament House - Supreme Court - Casuarina

Wednesday 10^th July

Another fabulous Fannie Bay sunset:

I was standing in a queue at the yacht club watching this beautiful sight, and I was very amused when the young girl next to me called out to her boyfriend, sitting nearby, Can you get a photo of that?  My camera is in my bag.  She then turned to her friend and didn’t actually LOOK at the sunset at all…

This queue was of epic proportions.  Pete had gone to buy wine and I stepped up to order dinner.  It all went at glacial speed but then…ground to a halt.  I was about third inline when everything stopped, so I went and got a nice plastic chair – I like to queue in comfort… There was some sort of snafu with the EFTPOS thingy and I reckon this added ten minutes to the wait.  I was quite happy on my chair, and I made a nice new friend, a woman doing her PhD in the desert, comparing the treatment of sites by Aboriginal people and by scientists.  She was having a month’s break from study, staying with friends in Darwin, but she had felt the need to escape from them for just a little while… They are vegetarians…and they don’t drink…I just wanted to get away and have a glass of wine and a large steak!

Coincidentally, one of our dinner companions, Sue, is also doing her PhD, on Aboriginal art.  We had a very nice evening, sitting on the edge of the beach, with two Peters, two Sues, one Andrew and one me.  (Andrew and Sue from Settlement, Peter and Sue from Darwin – this Peter is Andrew’s cousin.) 

(What did we eat, I know everyone is all agog… Pete made a good choice – a stir fry of prawns, ginger, shallots  I chose baked  barramundi and… this is always a mistake… I am hoping against hope that one day I will have barramundi and that it will be glorious.  So far, not so much…)

So far our impressions of Darwin are overwhelmingly positive.  Everything is so bright, sparkly, and above all, LEAFY! When we were tootling along on a bus this afternoon, I said to Pete, “Isn’t it nice, how there are trees everywhere, in Brisbane.”  He looked at me a bit quizzically and eventually told me we are actually in Darwin… Oh um well yes…

Most of the houses are surrounded by a veritable lush jungle of plants, which must make for blessed coolness inside.  I took a random photo of this one, from the bus on the way to Casuarina:

Those houses which don’t have much growth around them look strangely bereft, hot and bothered.  Fortunately, they are, so far, few and far between.

Most of today we spent in the city centre, traipsing around doing jobs.  Pete spent a lot of time in various banks; I cannily left him to it and went and sat in an outdoor café in the mall, where I sipped iced water, ate nachos, and serenely watched the world go by until poor hungry Pete turned up, ready for a hamburger.  (No this is not Pete; this is foliage.  I know!  But the foliage here is so pretty I can't interspersing it.)

Next was a visit to Customs, where we had to fill in varies forms in preparation for our departure.  All quite pleasant, and efficient.  (There are well over 80 boats lining up to leave all on the same day so I think they have streamlined operations for us.)

And then time for some touristy destinations.  Parliament House, completed in 1994, is just beautiful:

Majestic and cool, and full of beautiful art work.

Ann-Marie had told us that the Supreme Court is worth a visit too, and this was even more generous with art work.  Fabulous:

With of course the recurrent crocodile theme…

And just look how pretty this wall is, at the Brown's Mart Theatre:

 We hopped onto a bus after all of this culture, and sped off on our way to Fannie Bay.  But…the bus, we knew, went all the way to Casuarina, where there is a very big shopping mall.  Bus fares are very cheap for oldpeople… Pete and I are able to travel around for three hours, anywhere and everywhere, for $1 each.  (I don’t actually have an oldperson’s pass but, strangely, the bus drivers never query my decrepitude.  And I am not going to point this out to them.)

So we just stayed on the bus and tootled off to Casuarina, going ooh and aah along the way as we absorbed the sights of the outer Darwin suburbs.

It was worth the trek because we found exactly what we were looking for – new shoes for both of us:

Fitflops for me, orthoheels for Pete.

He badly needed new ones because this is what he has been wearing, since Weipa:

Tragic!!