Darwin

We celebrated 3 months of living on the road in Darwin. We based ourselves at the Oasis caravan park while spending our time here. Darwin really has so much to offer. Markets just about everyday at different locations offering fresh produce, exotic fruit and veg. You would think you were somewhere in Asia with the never ending food stalls. From Thai to Vietnamese, Indian and Malay It caters for all. We managed to see all markets apart from one. My favourites would have to be Rapid creek produce market, Mindil beach sunset markets and Nightcliff Sunday morning markets.

Darwin’s waterfront is a must see it has a man made beach, a wave pool and many fancy restaurants.

We managed to get the car a well deserved service along with changing our power set up in the van. The lithium’s that came with the van were good for low power consumption appliances but we needed more reliability and less dependency on powered sites. Caravan parks are busy everywhere. And since we spend a lot of time in the van it makes sense to be able to use all the power outlets all the time. This is where we got Ross the sparky to install a change over switch that would connect all our power outlets to our inverter. I have replaced the 240ah batteries with 400ah lithium’s from iTechWorld. Now we can be literally in the middle of nowhere and heat up Lowanas dinner in the microwave while cooling the van down with the aircon. Run the milk frother and coffee machine at the same time. And charge anything from ryobi batteries to the vacuum, phones to the MacBook. It’s over the top if we were doing the odd camping trip away but we are in this full time. We have also noticed how common power outages are at caravan parks, which doesn’t bother us now. With this much battery backup we don’t even need to carry a generator with petrol. It’s the way to go, clean energy and independent.

We booked a boat cruise to the Tiwi islands for the day. It has been on my bucket list for a while now so to be able to do it was very exciting. After a 2.5 hour boat ride we made it to the island. We were welcomed onto the island by the traditional Tiwi people and got to take part in a smoking ceremony (not cigarettes). Sad to say but that was our highlight of the day. The island has great potential however it’s been neglected. Plenty of rubbish lying around and feral dogs everywhere. Not what we were expecting. We don’t expect the place to be dressed up just for us but it was definitely falsely advertised and the pre arrival video is quite misleading. Taking a nice photo proved to be difficult

Lyndon had work lined up to do for a client but we had to wait for the work to be ready. Unfortunately our accommodation had run out at the caravan park and all other parks were booked out. We were lucky enough to stay at one of the clients warehouses. It was a different experience all together. Lowana got to ride her bike on a smooth flat surface which was pretty rare. It had everything we needed and was much more spacious than a caravan park! Once the job was completed we were off to Kakadu.