Friday - Tuesday, October 21 - 25 2011 (diary)

Hundreds of mangos are strewn around the ground everywhere and the mango geese are having a good time of it. I eat a mango for breakfast most days and have given many away but there are just too many this year to collect.

At night I am frequently woken up by a terrific bang, as yet another ripe fruit drops down from one of the two overhanging trees onto the corrugated iron roof of my cabin. It sounds like a loud gun shot and even Rene and Rick in their caravan next to me are woken up by the noise.

Meanwhile the rains have started. Is the the end of the "build up period" (high humidity but without the rain) and the start of the wet season ? I am not sure, but we had a couple of terrific rain and thunder storms this week and received a good 100mm (4 inches) of rain. It cooled everything down nicely.

I am perfectly content here these days. Ever since my childhood I have always had an affinity for warm weather in which I could walk around in shorts and a T-shirt and without shoes on, and here in the tropics I find myself in the ideal climate for that all year round. I also enjoy the heavy tropical rains and love to sit outside under the veranda roof of my cabin, watching the rain come down and listening to nature's breathing of relief and well being after the long long dry.

Wednesday - Monday, October 26 - 31 2011 (diary)

The world's most popular travel advisory organisation, The Lonely Planet Guide, has selected Darwin as one of the Top 10 city travel destinations in the world for 2012.
It represents an exquisite and imaginative contrast to some of the other selected cities in the world like, London, Paris, Hong Kong. Darwin is also the only Australian must see city on the list.
Besides its multi cultural community, wide selection of varied restaurants, array of colourful weekly markets, ancient landscape, and lush tropical flora and fauna right on its door step, it is also quite unique in an other way.

Darwin's remote location, separated from the rest of Australia by thousands of kilometers, has enabled its community to avoid the boring unimaginative normality of the restrictive spider web of social structures and stratifications so typical for most cities throughout the Developed world.
Instead it has developed a unique, free and easy, unrestricted and highly interactive social structure, in which the rich and the ones in power indiscriminately rub shoulders with all and sundry of the local population on a daily basis.   Nicole Kidman, when visiting Darwin for the shooting of a new film in 2007, described it eloquently : "In Darwin everyone is equal!" That sums it up very nicely.

And a great win too for Alan Joice, CEO of QANTAS airlines (Australia's National carrier). After 9 months of off and on strikes and disruptions of services by the various Unions, Joice decided that enough was enough and grounded the entire QANTAS fleet of aircraft right around the world. This forced the inept (Labour) Government's hand to step in and terminate all industrial action for 6 weeks, during which time both parties must come to an settlement.

Although they professed to be "impartial" the Government kept grumbling on and on about the unfairness of Joice's unexpected out of the blue action. The Australian business community however applauded Joice's brave action and to a man stand 100% firmly behind him. And so they should.
Once at a time QANTAS was the predominant carrier of all passenger traffic in and out off the country. Now its share of this market has been eroded to a pitiful 18%, entirely due to its higher pricing, which in turn are the result of high employment wages forced on by the inflexible Unions.