darwin...

arriving in darwin finding accommodations wasn't as easy as we had originally thought. it was the peak season for travelers and so the small town was packed with travelers and aussies trying to get away from the cold. so after lugging our stuff from hostel to hostel we finally found vacancies at a place called melaluca. upon arriving to darwin we had met several other travelers who warned us that trying to get to work and live in cairns might be even harder since cairns supposedly had no work and even more tourists than darwin. so we altered our plans of visiting the reef and decided to stay in darwin for awhile. although, melaluca was a lot like cancun during spring break week, with an extra scoop of dirtiness, there were some really beautiful parts to the town. every thursday and sunday there were open markets on the beach where few things could compete with the street foods, drinking cheap wine, and watching the sunset over the ocean. as beautiful as the oceans were people feared the water more than a 4 year old fears looking under his bed in the middle of the night. the waters are infested with box jellyfish year around, australian summers being an even worse time. one sting by the tiny jellies will put you immediately in the hospital and even kill you fairly quickly. as melaluca did give me nightmares that i won't divulge here, let's just say that my ipod was worth more than it's weight in gold, it did give us some great experiences and people to meet. we discovered a tool we named a "spife" that combined a knife and spoon, by an obviously unrecognized genuis who has been living his life in the shadows of the spork inventor. throughout out our travels we found the spife to be as useful as a finger is to a nostril. we also attended the darwin festival which had live music, nice organic decorations and lightning, and good drinks. the darwin festival also celebrated aboriginal artists and proved to be a good way to waste an evening. paula a friend of ours also celebrated her birthday early (since we knew we were parting ways during her actual birthday) by going to a proper dinner with some friends bianca, who paula had met in sydney, and adam an english bloke we had met in darwin. after really pursuing different living arrangements and work we realized that the reality was that neither carrie or i, wanted to live in darwin and that within a month the wet season would start, where the 100+ degree weather with insistant rain would infest the town, so we again decided to slow down and enjoy the things around us, instead of being so concerned with trying to manage all of our responsibilities at once. we would leave darwin and visit uluru, kings canyon, and kata tjuta on what was known as the "rock tour" in central australia, and then live and work back south in adelaide.