Darwin

It was sad to leave the cruise today. The company has been excellent, the staff fantastic, the weather superb, and the itinerary made the most of wonderful points of interest. This area really needs you to do stuff at exactly the right time of day and month to suit the tides. The water is much clearer for snorkelling at neap tide. The dramatic tidal differences of spring tide highlight things like the horizontal falls and Montgomery Reef. We almost got no wind at all. The ocean was absolutely smooth. Other trips here have not been as good. We had several passengers on the cruise who needed help to get places, and the staff made it their business to enable everyone to see everything.

We saw all sorts of things I haven’t talked about - flying fish, sea snakes, whales breaching, whales with whale calves really close to the boat (it’s the time of year when humpback whales have bred in Australian waters and are going north), crocodiles, dugongs… 

But this morning we finished the cruise in Darwin. 

It’s a city that’s been destroyed twice. Once during the Second World War, when it was bombed by the Japanese in 1942, and then taken over by the army for the rest of the war. Not many buildings were left standing after the bombing. Then at midnight on Christmas Eve in 1974, cyclone Tracey went straight over the top of Darwin - buildings were destroyed, then the calm of the eye came, and everyone went out and thought things could be worse, and then everything that had been ripped off came back to do much more damage when they were out of the eye. Only four buildings are still whole after both those calamities. I went to the museum and art gallery today, and saw the devastation from the cyclone documented there.

They also had displays of the indigenous art awards that have recently been given. It was fantastic, but I didn’t take any photos.

And then, I saw the display about Sweetheart, the crocodile that attacked motorboats and detached their outboard engines. It didn’t eat anyone, but it struck terror in the neighbourhood.