Moil, The Road Kill Cafe and Mindel Market

  Moil, Northern Territory, Australia
Wednesday, August 13, 2008

We took a taxi to Moil, as we might have guesses staying in a posh hotel comes at a price and our taxi was some high end car and cost us $35 for a 10km journey - A touch steep maybe. Our taxi driver was an interesting character though. He had been here for Cyclone Tracy, back in 1974. He told us some of the stories of what was left after the destruction. He did reassure us though that since then all houses had to pass strict building codes and each house had to have at least one cyclone proof room, he said his cost him $40,000 to construct. We have seen signs also on many street corners also pointing to a 'Safety House', but we do not know yet exactly what these are.

I had spent part of previous day going around Internet cafes seeing if I could log onto to my work account via VPN from them - leaving the hotel meant I had to find work access again. They didn't seem to work, something to do with the Internet access going out through a central server in the internet cafes and not been able to have a direct link and IP address between my computer and my offices computer - probably more technical information than you needed to know!

I took one of those cool bendy buses up to Casuarina Shopping Centre. It's a bit disconcerting when you're sat at the back and the bus turns, until the back compartment catches up with the front it looks like you're going the wrong way and are going to miss the corner. As I mentioned in an earlier entry I was dreading having to buy Internet access. We didn't have a phone line, most high speed Internet in Darwin is ADSL and cable does not exist here. The problem is you normally need to sign up for a 12 to 24 month contract for ADSL and we didn't have a permanent phone. The other problem is there are oodles of different plans and you pay by your data usage and if you go over then you get charged a fortune! I have never had to pay for data usage before and I certainly had no idea how much data I would need for personal usage and my work usage also!

After a good strong coffee and a brief discussion with a guy from a store called All Phones I made a snap decision and went for a wireless broadband plan. This is broadband coming through the mobile phone network that I think is fairly new in the USA. The things that stopped me taking the plan immediately was I wasn't sure if logging onto VPN for work would be achievable though this type of network. Last time I was in Australia my company said they did not support ADSL, so I was guessing wireless broadband was definitely not supported! Also the company would give no guarantees that I would get good mobile phone coverage, if any, where I lived! In the end it was a risky purchase and required a 24 month contract, for something that could fail on so many fronts, but I didn't really have too many other options! I rushed home and plugged in the necessary dongle, as the man in the shop called it, into my USB port and to my surprise everything worked surprisingly well. The bandwidth was about a maximum of 300KB/s, a far cry from 8MBs that we had with cable Internet in the USA, but it worked surprisingly well for my work and personal needs. Large file are slow to open but I don't use many of the bandwidth intensive sites like YouTube. Phew, one more problem solved! Oh I almost forgot, because it was a 24 month contract, they have to do a credit check - I was sure this was going to be a deal breaker and the sales assistant was on the phone chatting with some credit rating agency after my name never showed in their computer - doh, I'd only been in the country 2 weeks! He asked me to come back in 30 minutes, well I'm not sure what happened or how I got the green light, but I passed the credit check and was golden! I wish the credit rating agencies in the USA were as lenient!

I think we hit jackpot with the house we moved into. As I mentioned in my previous blog the rent was from week to week. Phil was one of the roommates, he was pretty quick to offer me his bike any time I needed it. This turned out to be a god send, especially for scooting round to open houses during the week. The other roommate was from Leeds, I knew we'd met a good bloke there and then (this is my home city in England). He was actually leaving to go back to England with the landlady in a couple of days time for a month and offered us his bed, this was definitely superior to our thin air mattresses and meant we had an almost empty house! We were pretty happy at this point and then a few days later Brooke, the landlady told us to take her car while she was gone in the UK. Trusting folks these Aussies - had she seen my driving :-)

I remember from my last visit to Australia helmets are mandatory on bicycles over here, so I asked Phil if he though I should wear one - he said nah, nobody will do anything, and as I found out on my first time on the road, nobody does!

Interestingly I'd always been told helmets saved lives, but this and a number of other sites I found when checking the helmet laws for the Territory refute that!

Here is some analysis that is mainly centred on Western Australia.

http://www.cycle-helmets.com/

* increased cyclist hospital admissions

* reduced the popularity of cycling

* damaged public health

The first point is a surprise and I haven't verified the numbers, but a reduction in popularity, increased environmental consequences and a rise in obesity rates all make sense.


That Friday, Kelly and Randy downstairs offered to cook us up our first Aussie BBQ. As I filled Randy in on my story of how I had seen two aboriginals buck naked washing in a local stream while I was riding my bike, he one upped me with a story about a couple making love in a park in broad daylight in the middle of the day. He had only just moved up here recently from NSW and seemed a bit shocked. It seems like we may be in for some interesting times! It was a good night; unfortunately I had a 10:30pm meeting with folks in the USA that rather curtailed my drinking! This was the first time I'd been called on my mobile phone over in Australia; previously people had just called the hotel. The meeting turned into a disaster for me. It turns out the mobile phones don't work too well internationally, especially when logging in to conference call lines! Despite numerous re-tries I never was able to hear any of that meeting even though people could hear me fine!

We did notice an increase in the bird population when moving to the burbs, Darwin had a good number especially down on the esplanade, but here the noise was constant and there seemed lots of variety. This certainly beat seeing sparrows everywhere, which seemed to be my lot when living in Somerville! We also noticed the noise from the airport where we lived and were surprised that planes seemed to take off about every hour all through the night for such a small airport. The airport is used by the military also I believe and there are a lot of military personnel stationed up in Darwin and we wondered if some of the planes taking off at night were RAAF planes.

Talking of planes. we did do some research into flights while visiting the shopping centre, Flight Centre seems to be the big chain. It seemed fairly pricey to get flights from Darwin. Some of the starting prices we noticed were

Sydney - from 250- one way
Hobart - from 320 one way
LA - from 2279 - return

There was a Singapore airline, Tiger Airlines, but that is leaving in October but Virgin Blue and Qantas where here! The positive news is JetStar, a budget airline affiliated with Qantas is just staring up here and will do flights to Singapore, Ho Chi Minh and Bali! Darwin is a bit remote, and I believe the fuel and airport changes are excessive here and that puts people off, but it would make a great hub for an airline for their flights coming into Australia!

We got to realise that heat is relative to ones perception; poor Phil who we lived with seemed to come into the kitchen each morning wearing his fleece and almost shivering. It's funny what people get used to!

One of the things we love and one of the great things about Darwin are the markets. There are 4 all together. Mindel beach, Parap, Nightcliff and Rapid Creek. All are superb and a lot of the vendors will sell at multiple markets.


1) Mindel beach is the tourist market and 'real' locals stay away. It's on a Sunday and Thursday evening and the other draw card is the sunset from the beach. This is normally fantastic in the Dry, but I'm guessing there must have been 200+ people there to watch the setting sun and they were happy to offer applause once the sun disappeared over the horizon! I'd say 75% of the stalls are food and the rest are mostly tourist souvenirs. I checked out the photographer stores and there was one good one, Paul Arnold, who also has a shop on Mitchell St. in Darwin. I have a pipeline dream of setting up stall there myself one day! Most of the food is Asian in nature and much of it on about the same level as you'd get in a mall fast food place, but some is definitely a class above the rest. We're starting to find out the better stalls. There are also juice ladies, our favourite, $4.50 buys you about 700ml of a mixture of juices of your choice. Mmm. There are yiros stores, ice cream and a few others that slip my mind. But my favourite store at the market has to be the Road Kill Café. Road Kill Café, who's slogan is 'You Kill it We Grill it' - http://www.roadkillcafe.com.au/public/index.php - I haven't tried any of it yet as I figure left in warmers all night it may be a bit dry, but they sell
ˇ Kangaroo
ˇ Wallaby
ˇ Water Buffalo
ˇ Possum
ˇ Crocodile
ˇ Emu
Some of which is freely available at most supermarkets and butchers.

2) Parap - This is a Saturday market and runs from 8am until 2pm. Pawpaw (or Papaya) salad is one of our favourites here. It's made with under ripe papaya and mixed in with some chillies - they always ask you one chilli or two, one is usually more than enough! There is also a great Indonesian gentleman who does lamb or beef sate sticks served with longtong, that is rolled compact rice, that has a very smooth texture. Over the top of this is a peanut sauce - absolute heaven!

Satay Man

There are some great flower vendors selling these beautiful tropical flowers that look fantastic.
3) Nightcliff - We only been here once, it seems a bit smaller than the other markets. It on a Sunday morning from 8am till 2pm. A good place to come for crepe style pancakes, a fresh coffee and a juice or smoothie.
4) Rapid creek - This is where we go to do a lot of our produce shopping. It's cheap and sold by mainly Cambodians and Vietnamese. There is a great organic store in the shopping centre by the market also. Last time we were in there the owner started to chew my ear off a bit, here is what his story was, I'll leave it up to you to decide if he was trying to drum up more business for himself. He started telling us how much chemicals (fertiliser, pesticides etc.) they all used on their veggies and how they believed anything that was organic wouldn't work, he then went on to say how they had separate plots for themselves where they would grow their own veggies chemical free!


Erica was starting to go away on here trips into the bush to help set up experiments and do what she was getting paid for, so she was gone for most of one week we were in the Moil house. It does sound pretty cool heading off into the bush in 4WDs and I will admit to been a little bit jealous as I sit at my keyboard typing away :-)


The good news from Moil though was we did manage to find a place to live - it was in the exotic sounding suburb of Coconut Grove. More to come on that next time!