Travels with Charlie in… Beers in Pacific Cities that Start with “D” for 200, Alex: Part 1

My friend in Sydney was impressed.

Not only had she not been to her new home’s national capital (as I had, decades ago, as a child, with Russ, on a daytrip from this New city of the Cambrian South, a daytrip in which, I feel compelled to add, my sisters were utterly uninterested; we ended up sat in the public gallery of the House of Representatives for their final PMQs of the session and saw many unparliamentary parliamentarians thrown out of the chamber under Standing Order 94(a); what is revealed by the knowledge of just how much I enjoyed the spectacle I’ll let you, my gracious reader, decide,) but she’d also never known of anyone who’d ever even been to Darwin, the city to which I was headed the following day, in the Australia’s Northern Territory. I knew little of the place myself, save that it was named for a man who had been brilliantly christened.

Upon landing, after a four-hour flight, in Darwin, and quite literally seeing the scorching taxiways bestride me, I lit up my phone, figuring I might at least sniff out, Beagle-like, where one could find a decent cold beer in this steamy town. Blessedly, bars were plentiful: it appears Darwinians enjoy a drink. Perhaps it’s evolutionary? A “local” (it was as local as I could find, being from Alice Springs, which lies, I think, over 1000 miles away from Darwin but still in the same territory and hey, beggars can’t be choosers at lunch time? or something like that?) beer and some non-Qantas-catered lunch (retrospectively, I regret not ordering the crocodile but, again, I’d just suffered through a Qantas breakfast and craved something familiar and guaranteed to be tasty), the rumbles in my stomach symphonically tooted, were required.

An aside: One thing I’d noticed in Sydney I noticed in Darwin as well: just how many young people working in the hospitality sector were American. And how every one I met planned to, somehow, parlay their working holiday visa into a permanent residency and stay in Oz indefinitely.

After lunch and not at all tipsy from the two beers which I sweated out as I consumed them outdoors in the 100 degree summer heat, I figured a stroll around the town would do me good. And so, fed well and wet, I ambled.

More from the Series

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

About Travels with Charlie

Name a country, city, island, restaurant or ballet performance and you can bet Charles Rudish has been there. Follow along as he documents his adventures around the world with this ongoing series. Charles offers a humorous and insightful perspective on travel, culture and exploring the world around you.