Tropical heat in Darwin

Lovely Berry Springs.

We’ve been in Darwin now for a week, with at least another week planned, parked in the driveway of the house belonging to our friends, Lyn and Fred Barlow.

On our way into Darwin we wove around a little, driving west to Dundee Beach (beautiful aqua water but too many crocs for swimming, the locals told us at a tiny beachfront Saturday morning market). We then called into the Berry Springs to see all the people having picnics and swimming in the clear fresh water.

One of the reasons we’re in Darwin for so long is that weeks ago, just after we had left Broome and were on the Dampier Peninsula, John got a call on his mobile from his heart specialist on the Central Coast.

The backside of the huge B-52 bomber, overshadowing
the other aircraft at the aviation museum.

As many of the readers of this blog know, he had a defibrillator fitted at the end of 2011 and has six-monthly checks to see what it’s been doing, if anything. So far it’s hardly had any work at all and he was told the battery would last for 8 years. He also has a monitor that plugs into power and sends messages to Berlin, if you please, every night (if there’s mobile phone coverage). Naturally, we’ve been in and out of power/phone coverage, but apparently the engineers in Berlin who monitor this device could see a worrying battery trend that they had noticed in two other such devices around the world.



Fred Barlow at the helm as we left his Cullen Bay
marina berth.

So they’d alerted the Aussie doc, he contacted John and suggested he have it checked and probably replaced in Darwin. John let him know when we were about a week away from Darwin and an appointment was made at a cardiac clinic here.

We kept that appointment last Tuesday, and even though the battery shows it’s still 86% full, the Berlin engineers say it will drop like a stone very soon . . . so on Monday (tomorrow) he goes back to the private hospital here for a local anaesthetic and replacement of the unit. 

There’s to be no driving for a week and then it will depend on when he feels like driving the truck. We hired a car when we first arrived, because it’s easier to explore in a car rather than the truck, and I’ve extended that hire by a week. I’ll be the chauffeur while he’s out of action.

We were tossing around as I took this sunset pic.

So far we’ve been driving all over Darwin, been to see a movie at the open-air Deckchair Theatre, caught up with a cousin living just opposite the Sailing Club, where we had a meal one night. We’ve been sailing with Lyn and Fred in their yacht and one night when they were at a function, John and I took a picnic of oysters and prawns to the parkland at Nightcliff, overlooking the ocean. There were hundreds of people having twilight picnics, walking their dogs, and cycling along the paths.



Birthday boy and his ice-cream cake.

We spent a whole morning at the Aviation Museum and intend having a visit to the Darwin museum and art gallery.

Last night I cooked a special meal to mark John’s 72nd birthday and we all drank champagne and red wine as we ate roast pork and a special ice-cream cake I’d made, sitting on the Barlows’ breezy back verandah. 

The heat is pretty intense, as is the humidity. As I write this, just before 10am, it’s 29 degrees, with 66% humidity and we’re told Darwin is having an early ‘build-up’ to the wet season. Top temperature today is predicted to be 32, which is actually quite moderate as it’s been hotter in previous days, but the humidity is definitely increasing.