Darwin

Darwin! I apologize to anyone who's been following for taking so long to write again, but since I've been receiving limited feedback I haven't been sure if anyone has been. Anyway, we are currently in the Darwin airport waiting for our plane to Perth. We arrived here two days ago after taking the Ghan up from Alice, which took us almost exactly 25 hours and consisted of eating, walking down corridors, eating again, sleeping, drinking multiple cups of complimentary instant coffee, eating, and playing cards. Meanwhile we saw hundreds of termite mounds and witnessed two wallabies having a slap-fight. It was intense. Quite a lot of the card-playing was done with Tim, a 26-year-old graphic designer that we latched on to- or possibly the other way around, considering that he was alone- while riding a tour bus up to Uluru and subsequently ran into three more times before ending up in neighboring carriages on the train. Very nice guy. The train was late getting into Darwin by about an hour and a half because we had been forced to sit at the station in Katherine waiting for a freight train, who unfortunately had priority, to do some shipping thing or another. This meant that by the time we got there it was almost dark, and it was impossible to see any of the sites that we had been hoping to glimpse on the way into town. The next day was great; we acted comfortably lazy for the morning, then after lunch we taxied out to Crocadylus Park, a crocodile farm and zoo with many interesting native animals and some beautiful exotic ones. I doubt I will ever have a chance to be that close to either an emu or an ostrich ever again. After a few hours there we were picked up by Geoff Stewart, who fished for Pete one summer about twenty years ago, and is somehow related to Stuart. He brought us to his home outside of the city, where we met his wife Mary, and sons Willem and Arlo. We had a wonderful afternoon and dinner with them and some of their friends, then were driven back in to the hotel. A very nice day overall.