February 25, 2016 – Darwin, Australia

We arrived early in Darwin this morning, because of our early departure from Thursday Island, as described in our previous post. Darwin is the final stop on our 10-day tour in Australian waters. As you can see from the map below, since leaving Sydney, we cruised north along the east coast of the continent (stopping at Brisbane and Hamilton Island), finally reaching the northern tip of the Cape York Peninsula at Thursday Island. After skipping that stormy port this past Tuesday, due to rough seas, we cruised westbound reaching Darwin – the northernmost city in Australia – this morning. 

We’re at 12.4º South latitude and, as expected, it was hot and humid today. We understand that the temperature and humidity were both in the 90s. It started out rainy in the morning, but then the rain stopped long enough for our time off the ship, although it was cloudy most of the day.

One oddity for Darwin is that we had to turn our clocks back 30 minutes to match local time, then we’ll turn it back 30 minutes again overnight tonight, to get back to universal time for this zone of the world.

We walked off the ship at about 9:30 in the morning and caught a shuttle bus right outside the cruise terminal. This took us to the Visitor’s Center in town. As planned, we then purchased tickets on the Hop-On-Hop-Off Darwin Explorer bus for a sightseeing tour of the city. We always find these buses to be a good way to quickly see the highlights of a city. There’s a running dialog on the bus about the sights where you’re riding. You can get off the bus at any one of the predetermined stops (10 locations in this case), do some walking around, and then get on another bus when it comes along. Cost was $30 per 24 hours per person.

Darwin is not a large city like Sydney (nearly 5 million people) or Brisbane (2.3 million people). Total population of Darwin is 125,000. It is capital of the Northern Territory, which at 548,000 square miles would make it the third largest Australian state. But, we were told that it has territory status, and is not a state. The Northern Territory is sparsely populated (243,700) and incorporates a large part of the vast desert wastelands of the Outback. In fact, Darwin claims that “The Outback starts here.”

In addition to its relative isolation (located on the Timor Sea about 2,000 miles NW of Sydney and 1,600 miles north of Adelaide), Darwin has had a tough history with two very painful events wiping out the city in the past 75 years. First was in World War II when Darwin suffered 64 air raids at the hands of the Japanese within 18 months. Worst was on February 19, 1942 (Australia’s Pearl Harbor Day) when a strike force of 188 Japanese aircraft from four aircraft carriers – the same strike force and aircraft carriers that attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, ten weeks before – bombed Darwin. We read that they dropped twice as many bombs on Darwin as on Pearl Harbor. The attack sank or disabled 21 ships, destroyed much of the city’s waterfront facilities, and wrecked much of the town. A second force of 54 bombers attacked two hours later. On that one day, 292 people were killed, and hundreds more were wounded, according to local figures we saw today.

Then there was Tropical Cyclone Tracy on December 24-25, 1974 which destroyed 70% of all buildings in the city and killed 71 people – the greatest natural disaster in Australia’s history. Almost the entire population of the city (35,000 people) were evacuated after the storm, in one of the world’s largest airlifts. The people returned and rebuilt, although most now seem to be living in steel-reinforced mid-rise apartment and condo buildings, at least from what we saw today on the bus.

On our bus ride, we got off at two places. First was the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory. This is a very nice facility which features exhibits on aboriginal art and culture as well as an excellent retelling of the story of Cyclone Tracy’s impact on the city. We were impressed with Sweetheart – a 17-foot long crocodile (claimed weight of 1,700 pounds) that was caught and placed in the museum some years ago. It had been attacking fishing boats and was deemed a hazard.

We also had lunch at the Cornucopia Café in the museum. 

Then we stopped at the “Defense of Darwin Experience and Military Museum.” There we learned a lot about Australia’s Pearl Harbor Day, as well as the heroic contributions of Australia’s military forces in World War II and Vietnam.

Here’s a few more things we learned about Darwin: It’s a multi-cultural city, with much more of an Asian influence than is seen in the remainder of Australia. Today nearly half the Northern Territory’s land is back in aboriginal peoples’ hands. Swimming in the ocean is not recommended here for two reasons – Box Jellyfish and Salt Water Crocodiles. Qantas Airlines began service as the Queensland And Northern Territories Air Service. There is a Royal Flying Doctor Service within the Outback, due to the lack of physicians in this very large geographic area; they currently have 60 aircraft.

All in all, we had a very nice quick visit to Darwin. It is an attractive, modern small city, but we're not sure we'd want to live in this remote outpost. The people we met here did seem to be happy and friendly. Maybe it's because (as we were told) Darwin has the highest per-capita beer consumption in the world.

Updates on shipboard activities:

Tuesday evening, we attended a show in the Galaxy Lounge by musician and humorist Jimmy Travis. We’ve seen him before, but he’s still great. There were many, many belly laughs over his 45-minute show.

During Sea day on Wednesday, we attended two enrichment lectures: Adrian Vickers (Where Australia Meets Asia) and Terence Smith (The U.S. Presidential Race). That evening, before dinner we attended a magic show with a small (20-person) group. The master magician was fantastic. After dinner, we went to the Hollywood Theater and saw the latest James Bond movie, “Spectre,” instead of attending the Hector Olivera concert (the world-renowned organist that we heard earlier in the cruise – before Sydney). Because of the movie, we also missed the cabaret show featuring jazz clarinetist Kenny Martyn in the Stardust Club at 10:30 pm. We just can’t do everything, but it’s great to have choices.

It’s been necessary for the Captain to make two changes to our upcoming itinerary. Our arrival in Bali on Sunday, February 28 will be at 2:00 pm, instead of 9:00 am, due to unfavorable tidal conditions. As a result, we’ve changed the date for one of our excursions in Bali to a different date – not a big deal. More interestingly, Crystal Serenity will now depart Shanghai one day early – on March 31st at 8:00 pm, instead of April 1st at 4:00 pm. Chinese authorities are apparently going to enforce a rule that vessels cannot call on two consecutive ports, so we must now go to a Korean port between Shanghai and Beijing (Tianjin) on April 1st. It was explained to us that this was due to recent “explosions” that took place in Tianjin.

We were happy to hear from our former dinner table mates, Norman & Sherry. They reported that their trip home to California from Sydney was uneventful. We’re sorry they left, but that was their plan all along. So far they haven’t been replaced at our table – there are now six of us (three couples).

After our 10 days in Australian waters, we’re now on our way to six days in Indonesian waters, with our first stop at Komodo Island on Saturday, Feb 27.

Jim & Ginny