The flight from Alice Springs to Darwin on Wednesday was surprisingly long. It was 2.5 hours from the south end of the Northern Territory to the north. Australia is big, and it only has 6 states and one major territory (the Northern Territory is huge, the other territory on the main island is Canberra, the capital city, which is a territory the way Washington DC is). New South Wales where we live, for example, is much larger than Texas.
Darwin was much nicer than we expected. Once again the vision of an old outback town (or city in this case) was quickly dispersed by reality. Darwin is a nice, albeit hot, city of 100,000. Katka and I explored the bicentennial park and Doctors' Gully area while Misa relaxed in the room. We ate a quick meal at a nice Thai restaurant on Mitchell street before going swimming in the hotel pool. Even though we were right by the beach we couldn't go in the water due to salt water crocodiles and stingers (jellyfish).
Thursday we slept in, worked on homeschool, visited the Darwin Military Museum, and flew to Bali, Indonesia. The military museum was more interesting than I expected. Darwin was unsuccessfully attacked by Japanese submarines, and then successfully by an air raid, in the two months after Pearl Harbor. In the air raid about 250 people died, with more than half of them Americans, including 88 on the USS Peary, which was sunk in Darwin Harbor. The attack was the first of about 100 by Japanese on Australian soil, and it was the worst in terms of casualties. The attack is shown pretty well in the movie Australia, which also depicts the life on a cattle station in the Northern Territory. After the museum we took a cab to the airport for our flight to Bali.
