After cooling our selves in the croc infested water of Edith Falls we hit the road for Darwin, stopping in at the Adelaide River Inn for a bite when it got to dinner o’clock. The Adelaide River Inn is famous for its Barra and Chips and for its enormous stuffed water buffalo, Charlie. Charlie starred in Crocodile Dundee alongside Paul Hogan and quite possibly stole the show with its beer drinking and playing dead antics. Apparently he was so well loved that he has now been forever immortalised in the front bar of the Inn for the enjoyment of locals and tourists alike. We kept driving and stopped to camp just before hitting the city and experienced our hottest van sleep to date. Darwin seems to have the uncanny ability of heating up even after the sun has gone down, making our van somewhat of a convection oven and after a few hours of suffocating heat we drove in to Darwin in the wee early hours of the morning.
Darwin, it appears is actually a proper city. After weeks and weeks of one horse towns and thousands of miles of nothing we were quite overwhelmed with the hustle and bustle of Darwin. Obviously my first priority was to find a battery charger for my camera so I could visually document the days to come and the second priority was air-conditioning. If we were going to survive this city we’d have to drop our blood temperature by at least a few degrees!
We ticked off priority one then found a nice cool juice bar to chill out in until we worked out a game plan for the next few days. We had 2 gigs booked in Darwin, one at the Happy Yess which was a funky little community run youth venue alongside a couple of local metal and “screemo” bands. The gig was brilliant fun and a great insight into the arts scene of Darwin. The other gig was an Easter Monday arvo session at the Ski Club which is a wonderfully casual outdoor bar with a stage looking out over the crystal blue waters of the bay. We took Brian (Taffys friend) up on his offer to be our tour guide and even ended up camping in his backyard for most of our stay. During our time in Darwin we got a call from an agent friend of mine who asked us if we’d be able to fill in last minute for a south pacific cruise ship gig as the band that was booked to do it had fallen through. So before we knew it we’d been booked on flights to Sydney and cut our Northern Territory trip short by a few days to jump on a big ole boat to play some music across the seas. Luckily we had one full day of touristing before we had to fly out so Brian and his mate Al took us on the tour of all tours – the Spectacular Jumping Croc tour of the Adelaide River. Now this was definitely a highlight of our trip, so much so that I think it deserves its own story…
