A Day in Darwin

 After completing three wonderfully relaxing days at sea, where the highlight may have been the porpoise sighting:

 we arrived in Darwin early this morning.  I was able to get off the ship first thing for my little morning walk/jog.  No rain (that would come later) and not too hot (that would also come later) and an interesting sighting along the waterfront.  Our Long Beachers might remember the Wibit water playground off of our beach this summer:

They have a much bigger and better one in Darwin:

Sadly, we discovered later that it was closed or we would surely have gone.  Well, maybe the rain would have gotten in the way.

Now, on to the real story of our day in Darwin.  Our goal for the day was to go to the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory.  Our main goal was to see some more aboriginal art.  The museum was about a 1 hour walk from the port and the weather did not seem too bad when we left the ship at about 10am, so we decided to walk there.  Well, we hadn't gotten very far when the rain hit - it is, afterall, monsoon season in the Northern Territory.   So we ducked under a covering and waited it out which didn't take too long.

When the rain let up, we quickly made it into the center of Darwin where we decided to walk on to the museum.

We tend to be overly optimistic when we embark on these walks and today was no exception.  It was a long walk in the warm, humid conditions but, at least the rain mostly held off and we did get to see some birds.

When we got to the museum we had a brief sit down to cool off and then were treated to some fabulous aboriginal art.  It made the long walk worth it!

Including these paintings on tree bark:

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We found the virus man to be very relevant:

After a lunch break for Barramundi Burgers, we explored the other areas of the museum which included exhibits on NT wildlife, boats, and Cyclone Tracy.

The patterns on these shells evoked aboriginal art for us:

It was such a good visit to the museum, that we treated ourselves to a taxi ride back to Darwin center.  There we dropped into a couple of art galleries in pursuit of tree bark art.  There was some in one gallery but they were too large and nothing struck me.  The man in the shop told us that tree bark art was not done much these days because of the resulting damage to the trees.  Oh well, I guess my quest is over.

That concludes our day in Darwin.  Coming up is a day at sea, a day in Komodo, Indonesia (where we won't get off the ship to see the Komodo Dragons - been there, done that), before arriving in Bali on Christmas day.

Peace and blessings,

Linda and Larry