How much for that beer?
Trip Start
Feb 12, 2011
1
38
144
Trip End
Nov 19, 2011
Where I stayed
Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia
Sunday, March 20, 2011
This didn’t really help us much as we had nowhere to stay and it was 5am on a Sunday in a town of 120,000. We knew it was going to be expensive, and the $4 cans of coke in the vending machines were just the beginning. Originally we had thought of camping out at the airport for a nap, but once past customs there was nowhere to go so we discussed our options with the information desk. Our best bet was a $90 hotel room which allowed an early check-in so we opted for that so we could get a nap in.
It was warm out and our cab driver dropped us at the equivalent to a rundown Comfort Inn. We were happy to have a room, despite a non-working shower, and took a nap. By noon we were alive and kicking and opted to go explore while they sorted our room out. We were on the "outskirts" of town which meant we had to walk six blocks to get 'downtown’. The streets were mostly quiet save the few wandering aboriginals we saw. We could have been in America had the cars been driving on the right side of the road. We eventually stumbled into downtown and past a few bars. We picked one to grab a bite and the sudden realization we would be living like peasants hit us like a ton of bricks. The menu was mostly pub food, and a beer was $6 and a hamburger was $22. The dollar is currently $1 to $1 so there is no way around it. Erica had a potato for $13 and I had the burger, which wasn’t worth $22.
We knew prices would be high, but we also know it’s unlikely we’ll ever have the opportunity for an epic road-trip through the center of Australia and the Outback again, so we would just have to be as frugal as possible, starting the next day. We had a day to kill before we picked up our rental van so we walked the whole town, stopping for a terrible iced latte at The Coffee Club, walking through the Bicentennial Park and into the harbor where there is a brand new urban development far more sophisticated than the rest of the town. We enjoyed a beer at an outdoor deck and noticed a group of 7 guys and 1 girl, which had been indicative of what we had seen all day. Clearly the male to female ratio is out of whack in Darwin and most of the men seem to be fit thirty something’s, something apparently lacking in Seattle according to Erica’s single friends.
By sunset we had made our way back downtown and into a trinket shop where we got a lot of advice on where to stop on the way down to Alice Springs, and a tip on cheap ‘jugs’ of beer at a dive bar across the street. At $7.50 a ‘jug’ we thought prices weren’t so bad, but quickly realized a jug is half a pitcher in the U.S. and the glasses are not pints. Either way, I was anxious to get a little dose of the local flavor and we weren’t disappointed as there were a good half dozen characters in there willing to chat us up. They were all various forms of drunks ("on the piss") and had plenty of useful information to provide, including detailed directions to a noodle joint that would later prove incorrect.
Being a Sunday, we missed closing time for most restaurants and had to suffer through some lousy late night pizza while watching a bunch of bros at another bar before bed. Our hotel hadn’t fixed our shower, so we got a new room and the first of a proper shower with plenty of hot water and enough pressure to blow you against the back wall if you didn’t hold on. We could get used to hanging out in Australia.
