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Saturday July 24, 2004

Darwin

No, not the operating system from Apple. This is about the city in the north of Australia.
I was talking with a colleague at work last week. The conversation turned to talking about remote places and I mentioned that once on a trip from Melbourne to Darwin, we had an intermediate stop in Alice Springs.

Alice is in the middle of Australia. It's where you'd probably land on your way to Ayers Rock, one of the big tourist attractions in Oz (complete with it's own luxury hotels). But that's two hundred miles away, further into the middle of nowhere.

But Alice Springs airport is small. Or at least it was when I went through there in the mid-80's. The kind that when a plane lands, they drive up with the vehicle with the steps on the back that you use to deplane and then walk a hundred yards through the blazing heat to the terminal. The day we were there, there was even a tumbleweed bouncing over the end of the runway.

Then we went on to Darwin. Here's where it is on the map. Hot and humid when we were there. It probably always is. Four things left a deep impression on me:

There was a rain storm each night. The same time each night. Like clockwork. We could look out the window, and the gutters of the road outside would be like a small flooded stream. Thirty minutes later, all the water would be gone and the ground would be dry again.
Crocodiles. We were working at a place overlooking the ocean in Darwin. There were special fences erected between the beach and the road to stop the crocodiles coming up into the city. Crocodile attacks are a real concern here.
Large size beer bottles called Darwin stubbies. A two litre beer bottle. I'm not sure that's a good or bad thing.
Road trains. Here's some great pictures. [1] [2] [3]. They take a little while to load, but they really are worth it. I only witnessed one of these during the fifteen minute "rush hour" one morning. Turning a corner in the city for what felt like five minutes but probably was only 1-2. Traffic lights are meaningless when this happens. Can you imagine trying to overtake one of these on normal two lane highway, in the old beatup ute that you take little Bruce and Sheila to the local pool in? You'd probably end up as roadkill.

[Technorati Tag: Australia]