…PG-13…

Written 8/6/13

Parental Advisory is suggested due to this post mentioning the (unintentional) death of a kangaroo ;-)

I arrived yesterday in Darwin.  It was about a 3 day drive from Townsville to here.  It was sort of a disappointing ending point to be honest with you.  I was unable to find reasonable accommodation so I have to stay with my travel mate for at least one more night.  Plus the city looks sort of dirty compared to some of the other places.  Getting here meant that I had to go through the Australian outback.  It was such an amazing stereotype.  There were so many caravans; hundreds of kangaroos, several bush fires, amazing sunsets and clear starry skies (fail on a sunrise because I slept through them all).

I experienced “road trucks” which are 3-4 trailer long semis that kick up every possible thing they can from off of the road.  They are intense and intimidating.  At first I just saw (and smelled) dead kangaroos all along the highway in Queensland.  Then once we got to the Northern Territory there were little kangaroos everywhere.  We hit one (I’m about 99.9% sure we killed it).  I was kind of upset about it for obvious reasons but it was unavoidable.  After we hit it I was on high alert trying to help the driver to not hit anymore, mission accomplished!  We didn’t see any bushfires until the end of the trip.  Something else that upset me but that was unavoidable for us obviously.  This is one resilient country I’d like to say!  I am glad that I chose not to fly to Darwin because I got to see a lot.  I even learned a new constellation and star name… BAM!

In the few hours I’ve been in Darwin, I’ve been taught about Australian rules rugby (and actually think I get it).  Next thing you know I’ll be calling people “love” and “mate.”  And for the record I actually really like that they say “love” here so much more than people back at home saying “sweetie”, “honey”, “baby”, “ma.”  It is an across the board term for both men and women to use and I like it just fine :-)

Miss your faces!

With Love,

Me

 

The view at the top of my hike up Castle Hill in Townsville...

This was at the top (thanks a lot!)

It was really pretty inside of this place, and there were beautiful and random birds in cages (turkey, ducks, peacock, etc.).

From one of the street entrances looking in...

One of the views from inside the garden (that is the hill I'd hiked up earlier in the day).

Walking along the beach on the main stretch in Townsville.

 

The outback at its finest...

...2 days of this... and cows and hawks and crows and kangaroo...

...driving...

...still driving...

...yep... (these bushes made me think of ballerinas for some reason(maybe I'm starting to hallucinate))

...tee hee hee... (got a little bored)

...sunset in the outback...

...it was pretty lovely if I do say so...

...and it seemed to take forever...

...you can't really see anything but this is one of the smaller bushfires as we were driving past... (I never knew when to pull my camera out to capture one so I didn't get any good shots of one)