Monday 2nd June
I was up about 09.30, went to the shop to get some food and returned to the hostel to do some laundry. Daniele was dying of a hangover and nobody else was up for doing much anyway, so we played pool in the hostel for a few hours to pass the time.
Later in the afternoon, Thomas, Konika and I went for a walk to see what was going on in Darwin and to get our bearings. It soon became clear that Darwin is a very small place, with two main roads running through it, a good few shops, restaurants and bars, and not a whole lot else. Darwins population fluctuates between about 80,000 in the off-season to about 120,000 in the peak-season (the time in which we found ourselves in Darwin). People come to this northern town at this time of year for the warmer weather, but most of the beaches are closed down due to the serious threat posed by box jellyfish that are heavily present along the coast. Crocodiles are a year round threat, as both freshwater and saltwater crocodiles prowl the waterways inland and at sea, thus making it unsafe for people to swim.
We took a walk along the seafront but there wasn't much to worth talking about, and we were back at the hostel before we realised it. There was a bit of a crowd of people back at the hostel, all of them keen to book onto a 'jumping crocodile' tour for the following day. We went up to the Maleleuca Backpackers and booked as a group, which entitled us to a discount of $10, bringing the price of the trip down to $55 each, which was a good result.
I had dinner with the Dutch girls and a few of the guys, and we all met up in Shenanigans for the karaoke night that the pub was staging. The place was packed and it was good fun, although there was no way I would have got up in front of a pub full of strangers and sung a single note. It was a good laugh, but karaoke can get dull after a while, so I headed back to the hostel long before the others called it a night.
