Day 6 - Circumnavigation 2025

Hello from remote, hot, and humid Darwin. This will be by far the smallest city I will be spending the night in with a population of only about 150k. It is extremely remote and the biggest city in the region. When people think of everything trying to kill you in Australia this is it. There are tons of crocodiles, snakes, spiders, etc so I must admit I’m glad to only be spending about 14 hours here, although there is a cool aviation museum that I unfortunately won’t have time to visit so I’ll need to come back to get to that. This is also the half way point in terms of distance for the trip.

Anyways today was pretty boring up until the journey to Darwin started. I pretty much just got work done until 4pm and then headed to the airport. Flying out of the domestic terminal there were definitely a few culture shocks, mainly to get airside you don’t have to scan your boarding pass or id. Security was also incredibly easy. I think I was through in less than a minute from entering the line to leaving.

I visited the Qantas business class lounge, it wasn’t really anything special but provided a nice place to wait for my flight. Since I had to check out of my hotel at 4 and my flight wasn’t until 8:30 I had quite a bit of waiting to do. It was serviceable and there was ample seating, but there was a noticeable lack of outlets.

The flight was pretty uneventful, there were a few weird quirks that I noticed, mainly that they don’t dim the cabin lights for takeoff or landing which I found odd and somewhat annoying. They also served a hot meal of beef sausages, green peas, and mashed potatoes which was decent for an economy meal on a 4 hour flight.

Darwin’s airport was also the busiest small airport I’ve ever seen past midnight, the terminal was full and the taxi stand had quite the line. Thankfully I was able to get an uber pretty quick and the short drive to the hotel was uneventful. The hotel is quite nice and looks recently renovated. Tomorrow is thankfully the last leg in economy for the trip and is a quick 4 hour 50 minute flight over to Singapore.