@ work

Hello Hello.

I've found a fulltime job in Darwin working as a kitchenhand :)

I've been working there the last 4 days and I can't complain about it. It earns ok, nice colleagues, and free food and drink. What else could I ask? :) Beats picking fruit by far. I had to quit my other job because the rosters overlap. But this job's better anyway, so no regrets :) I mainly do the washing up, keep the kitchen clean, do some basic food preparation and run around doing stuff for the chefs. Nice and easy.

Evy is having a harder time finding a good job. She's mainly ended up with different parttime jobs that are hard to combine. For the moment she's working as a waitress in The Deck Bar where she only gets about 20 - 25 hours per week. It's frustrating for her, but I'm sure something will pop up in the next few days though. Siegfried found a job pruning fruit trees on an island north of Darwin. Friday they are taking him there with a small plane. It looks like a fun job. But like almost all harvest labour it is not payed on an hourly basis, but is strictly contractwork. Meaning you could make very little if the conditions aren't right.

In the meantime Darwin has moved into the dry season. They only have two seasons here: the dry and the wet. The temperature is about 30 - 35 degrees all year round. In the wet it's very humid and generaly not a nice place to be in weatherwise, but in the dry it's just nice, sunny and hot all day long. The town intself is ok. It has some lovely green patches and a few beautiful secluded beaches. One other thing that catches one's eye here in the evenings is that there are huge pitch black bats roaming the skies at night. Never seen anything like'm. They're about triple the size of the bats we saw flying around in Sydney. Speaking of native wildlife, there's plenty of gecko's and funny lizards running around here too.

We have started counting down to our departure date, the 21st of july. After finishing work we'll only have about 5 weeks left to travel. Not a lot keeping in mind the area of Australia we still have to cover in that amount of time. After leaving Darwin we will be travelling to Kakadu National Park for a few days. After that we'll head into Queensland, home to the Whitsunday islands, lush rain forest, pictoresque beaches and loads of deadly animals to look out for :) After travelling in Queensland we'll have to check how much time we've got left. If it's possible we might take a plane over to Perth in Western Australia, rent a car there for a week or so to explore the area, and then fly back to Sydney where we'll depart for home. I'm not counting on it though. We'll see how we go. If we don't make it to Western Australia we'll just have to come back another time :)