From Western Australia we entered the Northern Territory. Now it is interesting to note that the Northern Territory is not actually a state of Australia. In 1998 the Northern Territory was invited to become Australia’s seventh state, but it refused. Now you find an odd system in Australia, where the Northern Territory has representatives in parliament without any powers and citizens who vote, but their votes do not count. Hence, an area of 523000 square miles, or about 1/5 of the country is in Australia, but not entirely of it. How odd is that :) Besides this oddity, there is also a province in Western Australia, which is called Hutt River Province. It will take you a rather long drive of 75 km over a dirt road to get to, but here you actually manage to leave Australia and return to it in just a matter of minutes. I now actually have a stamp in my passport saying that I entered and left Hutt River province! And, the add to it all, I am in a picture with the prince! Yes, Hutt River is governed by Prince Leonard and his wife, the princess! They even received gifts from officials from other countries and are indicated on a world map. So how about that: again, you are in Oz, but not really in it!

Before reaching Darwin, we first passed through Katherine – a dusty, inoffensive little community and the last town worthy of the name for some 400 miles. Darwin itself is in the steamy heart of the tropics, though when we were there it was a nice 30 degrees celsius and nothing too tropical. Although I wasn’t aware of this, Darwin was bombed repeatedly by the Japanese during WWII and then devastated again by cyclone Tracey in 1974. You will find quite a considerable amount of dangerous creatures in this part of the country, such as the box jellyfish, 5 types of stingray, 2 types of blue-ringed octopus, 30 varieties of sea snakes, 8 types of coneshell, stonefish, scorpion fish, firefish and others too numerous to list. No wonder nobody knows how to swim around here :)