Darwin Harbour

I am blogging in our lovely hotel room in the Mantra Pandanas in Darwin. Again we have booked an apartment hotel, which has worked very well during this holiday, so we have a living room / kitchen, two bedrooms and two bathrooms. We set off this morning to Cairns in good time for our flight, returned our hired car, and sauntered into the domestic terminal for our flight to Darwin. Imagine our alarm when we were told that we should be at the international terminal because our flight was going on to Singapore! We rushed across to the other terminal and got there just in time, perspiring profusely. The check in assistant was sniffling and told us that he was very sick; he asked James to carry the luggage onto the conveyor belt at the back for him. I assumed that he had a bad cold and offered him lemsip capsules, he said "Not unless they cure terminal cancer, but thanks for the offer." I felt awful and didn't know what to say, I should have thought of something supportive but all I could manage was "Oh, I see, sorry." 

Darwin is half an hour behind Sydney time which I found bizarre, I didn't know that time differences could be in half hours. As soon as we arrived we noticed that the temperature was tropical! We got the airport bus to our hotel, then went out for a walk. The centre of Darwin isn't very big so we walked through quite a lot of it. We went down to the war memorial and there are lots of commemorative plaques about the 2nd World War. I didn't realise that Darwin had been bombed in 1942 and that Australian soldiers had been involved in such fierce fighting in the South Pacific. The memorials were very moving. Then we went down to the harbour, which is quite smart with swimming areas and restaurants. We went right out to the wharf where there were lots of eateries and we sat down at a table right at the waters edge. The sun had set by this time but the sky was still lit with a very soft light; the blue-grey of the sky and sea merged into each other at the horizon. There were gulls swooping about and Davie pointed out a stingray swimming past at one point, we could see it clearly just under the water.
I won't be blogging for the next few days because tomorrow we are going on our safari to Kakadu National Park and we won't be taking much luggage so no iPad!