Click to Zoom Didgeridoo shop in Darwin

We cancelled our planned one day trip to Litchfield for today. Hated to do it in one way but we've been scheduled pretty tight.  Jane is fighting a cold or allergy attack.  She can't decide which one she is going to call it.  Hopefully if its allergies they won't be around in Cairns.  Andrew's flight out was at 2:00 pm so we rode out to the airport with him.   We needed to book our leg down to Tasmania and Jane and Andrew needed to take care of their New Zealand tickets.  Andrew went shopping last night for some groceries for his sea kayaking trip in Adelaide.  He won't have time when he gets back and the stores will be closed.  He had a banana and apple in his bag which they quickly confiscated.  We also had a plastic bag of his with a couple of items that wouldn't fit in his pack.  For a brief moment of panic he thought he had left his ticket at the backpackers hostel.  In the confusion we forgot to give him the sack so his plan to take care of all his groceries wasn't a 100 percent successfully implemented. Since we were in town all day we didn't see to many new species of wildlife. We did meet a weird looking family of opossums that live in a big tree right in front of our room.  They come down each night to beg for handouts.  We had some familiar home food for dinner at Coyotes (Mexican).  It was a hole in the wall with big helpings and cheap.   Andrew would have loved it.  Jane has been taking sample medications she brought with her.  Maybe one of them will be the silver bullet, if not maybe the Mexican food which is hot here will be.  We had a major change of plan today.  We decided not to drive, bus or train down the coast from Cairns to Brisbane.  We just won't  have enough time to see the rainforests and Tasmania if we spend all the time it would take to get down the coast.  We bought a boomerang pass segment to fly directly from Cairns to Hobart.  I think it is about six hours of flying time.   We will then split our remaining time between Tasmania and Cairns.  We also discussed renting a car on my last day in Adelaide and making the three hour drive to see  The Twelve Apostles As you can probably tell, our plan here was to hit as many National Parks and World Heritage areas as we could so we have purposefully not spent much time in the cities. Perhaps a few years down the road we'll take one of those trips and catch up on those areas. We wanted to do the "hands-on" kind of traveling while that's possible.  It becomes so clear how huge this country is when you start trying to get from one place to another!

Darwin is the capital of the Northern Territory and has a population of about 78,000.  It's a pretty lively place with a young population.  Cyclone Tracy flattened it on Christmas Eve 1974 - 80% of it was destroyed so what one sees now is a brighter, smarter and sturdier place. Most folks do like we have done - spend the time in this area out in the Parks and don't get to see a lot of Darwin.  The three days that we traveled through Kakadu racked up 1,142 Kilometers!  We saw several of the locations where parts of Crocodile Dundee was filmed.  We'll have to watch that movie again now.