Tina's wanderings around the world

In the morning we woke up and wandered among the Marbles yet again, ate our classic muesli, and continued on our way to Alice Springs. Now, the day before, on our way to Tennant Creek and the Devil's Marbles, my lower back had started locking up and giving me a bit of trouble. Well, at our first rest stop after leaving the Devil's Marbles, my back locked up to where I had to bend and twist in order to be able to walk. Talk about pain! I went to use the bathroom and had a bit of trouble standing back up, but I made it! Marcus and I walked around the rest stop just a bit, then we both decided it would be best for me to lay down in the back of the camper van to let my back rest. Little did we know that I'd be traveling back there for the remainder of the trip! Oy...well, we got to Alice Springs (with my sad Marcus driving up there all alone) and I got out of the car and walked around successfully up at the top of Anzac Hill (a town look-out and a WWII memorial). We headed into...

I must say that while we were in Kakadu, we ran into many pushy and rude vacationers. I'm used to people on vacation being super friendly (and with Australians already being such a friendly bunch, imagine them on vacation!), but I was disappointed to discover that these people were not kind! Pushing and cutting in tour lines, squeezing people out so they could take their precious pictures, letting their children run amok, and being loud and disrespectul at sacred sites. Many aboriginal sites and cave paintings are considered sacred. They believe that if certain people see certain paintings, or go in certain spiritual places, evil things will happen to that person or worse--earthquakes and other havoc will be wreaked upon the planet. These particular drawings that we were allowed to see, I imagine, are not of that type but they're still something that should be viewed with reverence. We would have loved to sit down and ponder the paintings, but the constant flow of noisy tourist...

That's the sound of a 12-day roadtrip full of potholes, typically Australian animals, and lovely landmarks. I had my last day at the audit office (yay!) and went straight from the office to the airport, and Marcus and I hopped onto our 5-hour plane ride to Darwin amidst seat-kicking, screaming children. Certainly not the best flight of my life, but we made it to Darwin and had a ride waiting for us. Roommate Bec's friends, Brooke and Tara, let us crash while we were in Darwin. Day one consisted of picking up the campervan and wandering around town, which in all actuality is quite small. We started out with the Tree of Knowledge, the Chinese Temple, Parliament, WW2 plaques (before coming here I had no idea how big the second world war was for Australia), then we walked out on the wharf to look out over the ocean while it mocked our inability to swim in it. Apparently there are all kinds of poisonous jellyfish, not to mention saltwater crocodiles, so although it's humid and i...