week twenty two | darwin, northern territory

There is something to really be said for reverse culture shock. Perhaps it’s unexpected nature, or the fact that after a trip that was filled with stress, overwhelming challenges, difficult cultural and lingual shifts and an overall lack of home comforts (and sleep) there is very little time to process what getting home might mean.

Post Timor-Leste all I could think about was getting back into the swing of things and getting down to some serious big picture development work from my familiar surroundings in inner Melbourne. However before that, we had to spend some time in an Australian city as foreign as the ones we’d encountered in Timor-Leste.

Darwin sits at the top of Australia, the distant capital sitting above the vast red desert heart of Australia.

I’ve done shamefully little travel around most of my lovely home country and so this between-flight stopover presented a perfect, if not tiny, opportunity for me to see what’s up in this end of the country.

We arrived late in the evening, the air just as muggy as when we left Australia but this time the sticky breeze proved a welcome change from the overwhelming dryness we had been in for the last three weeks. After stowing our packs we hopped into a cab and headed towards the famous Mindil Beach Markets. They were just awesome, with live music filling the air, people smiling and dancing. It felt good to be home, but I was also left with a real sense of needing to travel more within Australia as soon as possible. This feeling was probably also exasperated by the fact I was reading “Tracks” at the time, a fantastic book written by Robyn Davison about her journey across the western Australian desert.

After our wander, and food tour of the markets we decided to meander down to Darwin’s main strip. In the darkness Darwin seemed quiet and a lot like other Australian cities. The strip was small, just a series of bars and pubs, and very ‘boys-night-out’ as we had unfortunately picked state of origin night to have our walk.

If international travel gives you better insight into the world around you, then coming home surely provides a brief reflective period of self-discovery. Perhaps the most noticeable one for us three girls was that as much as sexism and gender was a hot topic for our work in Timor-Leste, the wolf whistles and disgusting things shouted our direction from those bars was a horrifying way to be welcomed home.

Overall the trip to Darwin was one I was happy happened, but equally as happy to have behind me, however I’m willing to believe that it was the shortest of trips and poor Darwin got a very tired and overwhelmed Matilda rather than a rested one, ready for anything.

I’d like to go back, I’d like to see it in the daylight and to make some less uncomfortable memories. Because from what I have heard, Darwin is a pretty lovely place.

2/5 HIPPY MARKET STALLS