Onwards to Darwin. A bit of a shock, stepping out of the plane into the steaming humidity! Our friends Rach & Grant who live there said it’d been settling down into cooler weather but a week before we arrived it had got super humid again - almost like the build up to the wet all over again. 36 degrees but extremely muggy!
We stayed out at Howard Springs Big 4 so the kids had heaps to do while we spent a good week doing a bit (ok a lot) of maintenance and getting supplies. We picked up our vehicle and trailer from Luke’s who had kept it on his bush block. What an awesome guy, raising an awesome family. We are super grateful to The Lett family at church giving us the Hillsong contacts in Darwin which enabled us to meet Luke. He owns a 4WD service called Paul’s service centre so if you are ever in need of repairs & maintenance in Darwin- he’s yr man. While we were away he put on a new winch for us, serviced our truck and changed a CV boot, already done and waiting for us upon our return. Amazing! Super grateful!
Tony was kept super busy over the next week. We changed the gas regulator on the camper, bought and mounted a new roof rack, mounted new spotlights and light bar. New roo whistles were mounted on the front of the truck too along with tyres pressure sensors for the tyres with screen mounted to the dashboard. We bought and mounted a 120W solar to the roof of our vehicle and hooked up our portable 180W solar so it could be attached to the top of the tinny while we were towing as well. To maximise our sunlight hours. We put in new USB ports inside the car, mounted a new rooftop DVD player for the kids and had a few troubles with our trailer connector. Our car broke down for a day or two and we couldn’t work out why. It turned out (thx to Luke’s expert help & on the weekend too) that when Tony had tightened our trailer connector a screw had shorted out two wires and caused a brake fuse to blow. Because you have to have the brakes on to start the truck - it wouldn’t go! It took Luke a very small amount of investigative work to figure that out, hook our computer back up and have us running again!
Rach & Grant are both ex-colleagues of mine and good friends and we wanted to spend more time with them. Grant was a fellow scientific observer in NZ as we trained together and later, I became a colleague of Rachs when I became a Fisheries Officer in Auckland. Since they’d moved to Darwin they would talk about their bush block on Bynoe Harbour which we really wanted to see so eagerly accepted an invitation to head up there with them, stay & get Grants knowledge on some good Barra and mud crab spots.
Needless to say - with Grants local knowledge we had Barra, mud crabs and “ockock” (another fish named for its noise it makes) for dinner over the next couple of nights.
It was super hot there & the mosquitoes were INTENSE all day long so the little swim spot they had was a welcome retreat mid afternoon. One always has to check for saltwater crocodiles because of course it empties out into the harbour but it was fairly dammed up with life & debris from the wet so we all jumped in and had a great swim for a couple of days. Still a little eerie though for this Kiwi....
From Bynoe we travelled through Litchfield National Park. We wanted to do some 4wding but That part of the park through to Surprise creek wasn’t yet open so we stuck to the main areas. You can get through all the highlights in two days - 3 if you want to take your time. See our you tube account for a movie on some of the spots.
After heading back through Darwin to explore the Mindil Sunset markets & gather supplies we headed south as we wanted to do another week at Lorella Springs before heading to WA.
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