Kununurra is like I mentioned the most beautiful town in the world, but is really very small town breathing in its slow rhythm. We did not stayed there for long and travelled on to Darwin. Last two thousand kilometres we drove we made an interesting observation. When outside temperature is over 38C degrees and your car doesn´t have an air conditioner, you usually open the windows. Worm wind blows in, which has a temperature hotter than your body. It makes the situation worse and you close the windows again, which is better option, if you leave inner air flow on. Maybe many people know it, but for us it came through personal experience from life itself! In Estonia it is not possible to test such situation every summer, thou maybe couple of times during the century!
We got to Darwin by the evening and stayed for the night. I have monitored the weather forecasts about biggest cities of Australia at least for a year and in the case of Darwin it is almost always rain. Within seconds you might get on yourself the pouring rain. You never see such pelting rain in Europe. After 10 minutes it might be over. That may happen ten times per day!
In the evenings and weekends the parking is free and we were able to stroll around town. We went to a pub, where Hannes took couple of beers and discussed how is better to drive through Queensland without any problems. You all know that in this state flood is caused major damage. A very nice girl brought a beer to Hannes and cleaned up our table. We made some reasonable comments about her beauty in Estonian and were really shocked, when she responded “Tere”. This means in Estonian “Hi”. After that our comments in Estonian took inner dialogue or inner monologue shape. In Darwin there are plenty of Estonians.
A day before Hannes departure we took a hotel room. Hannes started to through his things on the floor to pack them later and suddenly there was not much space in the room anymore. Surprisingly he managed to stuff all the things into a baggage. Hopefully it is not more than 20 kg-s which is allowed in the hand baggage. Next unpleasant surprise in the morning was that our car hasn´t got fifth and reverse gear anymore! These are most vital gears and without them it is impossible to continue our trip. When we got to the airport we saw that Hannes flight has been postponed. After Darwin in Melbourne after two hours Hannes must sit on a plane to Hong-Kong. By 8AM we knew that big troubles are ahead. We have to rearrange Melbourne – Hong Kong ticket, when in Europe everybody sleeps. At last we found Finnair telephone number in Sidney and took care of it. They promised to send us the booking number, but we never got it! Finally we called to Triin in travel bureau Wris who sent necessary information. Since we had plenty of time we tried to fix our car. The gears were missing, but clearly the fault was not in the gearbox. Without any technical details to bother you – yes, we did fix it! A day started lousy turned out to be great! I mean great for me, because Hannes flight was postponed and postponed again and again…
Information about Queensland roads condition was hard to get. In one information point a girl spitted out 100 words per minute and the only thing i understood was that this kind of information we don´t get from them! Having such knowledge I decided to stay in Darwin for two days more. Yeah, who wants be somewhere between fields on the Australian Day (26th January)?!
Just when things go smoothly my cameras battery died! I´ll try to buy new in the shop and post some pictures in the next update. In Darwin I have a plan to do something that I haven´t done for a really long time, but about that I tell you in the next update!
25. Jan,
Darwin