After we returned to Darwin from Kakadu we moved to the Palms City Resort, which is right in the city but looks as though it on some Pacific island, with little bungalows squeezed in amongst palm trees, and a nice little pool in the middle.
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| The Palms City swimming pool, and Sue. |
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| Sue whips up some bbq sausages for dinner on our deck. |
We had our own little deck where we could eat or sit and read. It was very nice.
On our last day we took advantage of having a car to drive out to East Point to visit the popular military museum there. On the way we stumbled upon a great coffee place on the beach, the Salty Plum cafe. We could have stayed there for hours...
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| The Salty Plum cafe - bean chairs under the palm trees, and the Timor Sea. |
The military museum has a modern pavilion and multimedia displays, and a garden area displaying a large number of WW II military vehicles and equipment. We watched a dramatic cinematic display of the bombing of Darwin by the Japanese in 1942. They sent hundreds of warplanes over Darwin and destroyed a lot of the city and port infrastructure, surprising the world. This was just two months after they had attacked Pearl Harbour in Hawaii, and the attack was led by the same commander.
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| Inside the military museum, a.k.a. the "Defence of Darwin Experience". |
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| The biggest gun. Never really used! |
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| A searchlight which could spot planes 30 miles away. |
On Saturday we left Darwin and flew to Alice Springs, the flight taking just over two hours. We arrived just after 9 am, and were meet with brilliant sunshine and a brisk temperature somewhere about 5 degrees. A shocking change from Darwin - we had not expected that Alice would be cold! I had to pull out my fleece top for the first time.
