Darwin--survival of the fittest!

February 21, 2018

Darwin--survival of the fittest!

Darwin, the capital of the Northern Territory is closer to Indonesia than any other Australian city. It lies on the Timor Sea in a region called the Top End. My impression of the city was that mother nature didn't want human habitation in that area and was doing its best to discourage people from living there. The fact that 145,000 people insist on calling this home was beyond my comprehension. To start with, at only 12 degrees south of the equator, the average high temperature year round ranges from 87-92 degrees with 37-72% humidity and an annual rainfall of 68". It is situated in a region of the world susceptible to cyclones and was devastated in 1897, 1937, and 1974 and had to be almost completely rebuilt each time. During WWII, the Japanese tried to bomb it to smithereens. On Feb. 19, 1942, the same fleet of Japanese war planes that attacked Pearl Harbor dropped an even larger number of bombs on Darwin in the first of many raids. The damage from the war required another rebuilding of the city. Aside from those acts of mother nature, there is the continual threat from the animal life in the area. The saltwater crocodiles, called "salties" by the Aussies, accounted for 14 human deaths from 2005 to 2014. And if'n the crocs don't gitcha, the box jellies will. This is a city surrounding a harbor larger than Sydney's, that's hotter than H__l, with NO ONE in the water!

At our port talk yesterday, the excursion chief warned us that the residents of this remote area were pretty laid back. She said, "Be happy if the guides show up with their shoes and their teeth." Well, for many of our buses, they didn't show up at all. We were also told that with another cruise ship visiting on the same day, buses had to be brought from Alice Springs, a distance of 930 miles. The other ship took up the usual cruising berth in town making it so we were relegated to the East Arm industrial wharf. The security was very tight and only let three buses into the dock area at a time, making the process of getting our 900 passengers loaded onto their excursion buses much slower than usual. When we finally got on board, our driver told us there had been some confusion about which cruise ship they were to serve, and that when he got to us, he was told he would have to be the guide and driver. However, even though he wasn't prepared, he did his best to point out the highlights and tell us lots of gory stories about crocodiles and box jellyfish.

We spent about an hour at the Northern Territory Museum and Art Gallery. There we saw many natural history displays of some of the many animals of Australia. Clockwise from the upper right, a black-headed python, galloping crocodiles, a sculpture of box jellyfish, and a scary looking lizard.

Sweetheart, who had been terrorizing fishing boats before he was accidentally drowned when hunters tried to capture him to move him to a crocodile farm, was safely stuffed for our viewing pleasure.

He was 16' 10" and weighed 1,720 lbs. When they cut open his stomach, they found pig bones, two long-necked turtles and parts of a large barramundi.

In another section of the museum was a display about the 1974 cyclone. Here are some pictures of the damage mounted on the corrugated metal which had been used in much of the housing construction. The narrator of a video we watched said that the worst of the roaring sounds made by the up to 200 mph winds was the sound of the metal pieces clanging they scraped the ground and slammed into other structures.