In Darwin Again
I went to Darwin again this weekend. Rohan and Liza have had problems with the roof of their house and it’s practically impossible to get anyone to fix that sort of thing nowadays – tradesmen have become a very rare species! The wet season’s not too far away and a leaking roof really isn’t good for an old timber house, so i said i’d go over there and fix it for them.
I caught the 5.05pm plane on Friday again. It was full and i was the last one on board – as usual – and i ended up squashed up in the middle seat in the back row. The planes are 19-seaters and all rows except the back are just single seats either side of the aisle. But the back row is three seats – and there ain’t much space! But the flight only lasts an hour, so it wasn’t really much of a hassle.
Soon after i arrived, we went out to eat at the Darwin sailing club – which is a short walk from their house. The club is right next to the beach at Fanny Bay, and there’s a big outside area with tables, so you can sit and eat or drink and look out over Darwin Harbour. And it’s a great place to watch the sun set over the water at this time of year!
Being out of Maningrida – and therefore able to drink – i went a bit overboard and had three glasses of red wine! 
Yeah, well, it’s not very much, i know, but i don’t drink much these days and it was fairly crap wine, so i felt a little bit the worse for it next morning – when i got up at 7 o’clock, so i could get up on the roof and start work before the sun got too hot.
Well, i spent a big chunk of the day up there on the roof – in the hot sun mostly – and i got done what i needed to do. Whether it will fix the problems – and if it does, to what extent it will work – is something we won’t find out till the wet season.
Late morning, i had a break from the roof and went round the corner to the Parap market to get some breakfast. As i probably mentioned in an earlier blog, there are loads of Asian food stalls at Parap market, with quite a mindboggling array of different food to choose from. I eventually settled on a fish curry with some extra chilli. Then i had a long black coffee and a sweet sticky Vietnamese thing that i don’t know the name of. I think it’s mainly coconut cream, sugar and taro or something – whatever it is, it’s yummy!
This morning (Sunday) we went to Rapid Creek market at about 8 o’clock. Rohan and Liza do their weekly vegetable shop there and i wanted to get some fruit and vegetables to take home with me this visit too.
I managed to get hold of a banana box to put everything in – which was necessary, as it was going as hold luggage on the plane. The stallholder who gave me the box said he needed them, but i could have one – which was nice of him. Almost all the stallholders at that market are Asian and they all grow their own produce, as far as i can tell, so they don’t have a ready supply of boxes, like stallholders who buy it all wholesale do. I bought loads of bananas off him, and some broccoli and snake beans.
From various other stalls i got some green mangoes, avocadoes, a whole load of star apples (not the 5-cornered fruit, but a South American tropical fruit), some nice tomatoes, capsicums, limes, some Thai ginger, some really fresh zucchinis, sweet potato, some green leafy stuff that i don’t know the name of, and a Vietnamese mint plant in a pot for my garden. I also bought a couple of little banana leaf-wrapped parcels of banana sticky rice and some bananas fried in batter.
That was about as much as i could fit in the box – and about as much as i reckoned i’d get away with in my baggage allowance. Baggage weight isn’t normally a big deal on that flight, because if you’re over weight and they haven’t got any spare capacity, they’ll send the remainder of it on a flight the next day. But with fruit and vegies, i couldn’t take the risk of them having to hang around in the airport for 24 hours.
After i’d done my shopping, it was time for breakfast from one of the food stalls there. Today, i had Malaysian food – chilli fish, coconut rice, curried breadfruit and some kang kong (green leafy vegetable).
I could quite easily get used to breakfasts like that every weekend! 
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