26th September - in Darwin

We've been here four nights now (well tonight is the 4th night). This is officially an Australia Trip Record - the LONGEST TIME SPENT IN ANY ONE PLACE! We've stayed here twice as long as in any other place! Wow! It's been so good thought. We've slept some, relaced some, and had a great time, and we're ready to get back on the road again tomorrow. :)

I just got back from having a shower - you have no idea how refreshing a shower is after being battered and bruised by the unrelenting heat and evil little sandflies that make huge white lumps on your skin and leave you needing to scratch on every inch of skin, but despairing at your lack of fingernails… :( It's unpleasant.

But the depressing part of a shower is having to get out of it. You see, the very second you turn the cold tap off and start drying yourself off, the heat creeps back and your skin feels like someone just poured honey down your back, it's so slimy.

Not a nice picture, I know, but that's the way it is here in Darwin.

There's a cute little green tree frog jammed in the corner under the sink in the bathrooms here. It's been there about a day. Cooper and I discovered it. He was ecstatic. :)

Before the shower was dinner - pies, potato, veggies, and plenty of tomato sauce. Maryanne (did I mention that we have friends who live up here? Maryanne's the mum) reckoned Joseph needed fattening up (just kidding), so she gave him two meat pies to eat (he LOVES them!), so he ate both of them today, as well as the pies for dinner - three in all!!! Hungry chap. :)

I washed the car today - it really needed it! You wouldn't believe how much dirt, mud, and even rocks and bits of bark were jammed every which way in cracks in the car! Just behind the back window is a little vent, and as I hosed it, big rocks came out! I couldn't believe it!!! Dad had greased the whole car with fish oil before we left (and it stank for weeks! It was even deodorized, and it still stank!). He'd sprayed in so much, it oozed down the sides of the car under the doors!! Eeww!! And I had to clean off the big oily drips on the white paint! Let me tell you, after that, the rag I was using was totally black, slimy, and all stuck together. Gross!

A guy actually walked past as I was washing it and said that, for 5 bucks, I could do his. :)

We've been having a great time with the family up here. The eighteen-year-old girl is in the middle of exam block, so she can't hang around much, poor thing. But Maryanne can.

The first night we were here, Friday, she took me to their youth group. I met heaps of lovely people. They're all super, super nice up here! We played human battleships, which was fun. I met a girl who'se going to India this Wednesday for a few weeks for a mission trip! Wow!

And the best bit about the youth group was… the COLD WATER!!! (nah, just kidding). But really, I think cold water has a taste of its own - and IT-IS-GOOD! I would have drunk the whole water cooler-full, except cold water really burns your mouth...

Saturday, she took us all to the wavepool in the middle of Darwin city. It cracked me up - mum was driving, and we got to the city, and mum said, 'is that it!?!' incredulously! It's tiny compared to Brisbane. :)

The wavepool, a multimillion dollar investment, was heaps of fun - we 'sailed' for several hours in the big donut floaty things over the waves. Dini, Dom, Jo, Oskar and I all sat in one, joined hands in a circle, and rode the roughest waves all the way in! That was heaps of fun, but I think one boy we didn't even know got particularly annoyed… He yelled at us to, 'just go away!' But Mum said to not worry, so we didn't. :)

We had dinner with the other family at their house too. I made the packet mix cheesecake in the icecream box again, but we forgot it. :(

The family took us to the nearby park, where there're two big hills that are GR8 to slide down on cardboard! Even Cooper went down - he was so cute!!! Sadly, every time dad sent him down, he cried, but when mum took over, he was deliriously happy every time he went down the hill!!! Shows mums just have the knack…

Dinner at their place was yum yum for my tum tum - hamburgers! With Kangaroo! (I didn't even know until Dad told me as we were driving home…)

The family introduced us to Roomba, the awesomely cool new gadget that vacuums your home by itself! We were facinated by her artful, sweeping (literally) moves, her graceful turns as she sucked your floor to blissful whiteness…

Except she needs a lot of maintenance - like a baby. You have to change her nappy (the rollers), keep her out of trouble (clear the floor), put up those baby blocks (would you believe they have a 'virtual wall' that comes with the vacuum cleaner!?!), and heaps of other things!

Cool, but too much work for us!

Yesterday we went to their church at Darwin Baptist. I think it has three services a day! (considerably bigger than ours in Brisbane…) We sang some really cool songs - some we knew, and plenty we didn't know! One of them was especially cool - 'All To Us' by Chris Tomlin and three others I can't remember… Grandad, you should look it up! :)

The sermon was about the mission field, and how you don't have to be in central africa to be a missionary. The pastor said there were several important elements - integrity (which I think is almost the most important - to act what you speak), love, compassion, and several others I have trouble remembering…

In the afternoon we went to the museum, which I have to say is considerably better than the one in the city in Brisbane. There was stuff all about sweetheart, the massive crocodile that terrorised many a boat and ended up drowning (even though crocs can hold their breath for up to one and a half hours), Cyclone Tracey (that was freaky), and heaps of aboriginal paintings - some of these looked at first just like a boring pattern, but when you got close, you saw it was a seriously complicated, amazingly done, beautiful pattern repeated over and over again. Some of those paintings must have taken months!

Dad also went to the army museum (no idea what it's called) with Jo and Dom. Did you know that Darwin was bombed 64 times during WWII??? And NOONE EVERY HEARS ABOUT IT!!! WHY!?!?!?!?

I have no idea, but Dad was fascinated. One of the worst, most sick things he found out in the museum was this:

The people of Darwin took the guns they'd used to shoot the Japanese, and sold them to the Japanese as scrap metal!!! Whoa!

Well, This weekend's been great fun, but I think today, Monday, tops them all - we went to see the crocodiles jumping! To tell you the truth, although we went to the original one, and paid a fortune for it, and ended up with an hour's worth of wimpy little, half-warmed up crocs flopping around for their food (okay, it wasn't quite that bad), we had a really good time.  It's quite scary to see those massive crocs up so close! The male crocs fight, so half of them were missing legs. The croc jumping company even has names for all of them! Like Chase, Scarface, and so on. None of them jumped clear out of the water, but we did get a good show. There were a few fights to see, too, because a lot of crocs came into territory that didn't belong to them (for the food), and crocs get very nervous when there's another in the vicinity! We also saw quite a few hungry birds circling around to get the pork the brave woman was feeding the crocs - whistling kites, and another type of kite, and another type of bird as well. :) Apparently the whistling kites are pyromaniacs - they wait at the edge of bushfires to eat all the escaping animals. When that fire burns out, they pick up a burning stick, take it somewhere else, and set that on fire too, to draw out more animals!!!! Scary for the firemen!!!  :)

We're heading in the direction of WA after this - crossing the border will be a first for all of us this time! WOW! Apparently, you're not allowed to take any fresh fruit, etc over the border!