TOD Tour 2.0 Day 58 - Oil Tunnels, RFDS and The Esplanade

The WWII oil tunnels

Our third day of public transport. The caravan park is located near the bus stop on the main road into Darwin City and its only about 20 minutes to the centre of town.

We started today with a walk across the Skybridge which starts a block away at the end of Smith St. A block in the other direction is the famous Smith St Mall. The Skybridge goes from the cliff edge on the Esplanade across to a building in the Waterfront precinct. At the end of the Skywalk is a glass lift which drops you down to the restaurants of the Waterfront and the Wave Pool.

There are no surf waves at Darwin ... not unless a cyclone is hitting the place ... and then there's the problem of Box Jellyfish, estuarine crocodile and sharks. As a result, if you want to catch a wave, you go to the Wave Pool and surf in safety.

Nearby is Fiddlers' Green, an Irish pub with great tucker, good coffee and Guinness. My kind of place.

Not far away are the World War II oil tunnels. After the Japanese air raids began in February 1942 and the big surface oil tanks which supplied shipping were damaged, it was decided to undertake the ambitious project of building tunnels into the cliff face and placing longitudinal steel tanks in them. To fool the Japanese bombers, the majority of work was done with hand tools, as the use of machine would have tipped them off. The piles of soil outside the tunnels was, however, apparently missed by Japanese Intelligence. Once the tunnels were deep enough, steam shovels were included in the digging, which caused a further problem. The steam they generated pushed the humidity in the tunnels up to 95% and with the heat hovering near the old century mark, the workers went on strike.

By the end of the war, only six of the nine tunnels were completed and none of them were ever put to use during war time. Two of them were eventually used for a variety of purposes. At one time, a tank holding kerosene ruptured after heavy rain which caused the the tank to implode during the night. Thousands of litres poured out and made its way into Darwin harbour. Oops!

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After the tunnels, we caught a free shuttle around to the Stokes Hill Wharf and the Royal Flying Doctor Service museum, which we had visited late yesterday afternoon. We had another turn on the virtual reality version of that first air raid in 1942. This time, Sue armed with the tip to rotate her chair and look all around her, found the experience thrilling but needed to sit quietly on a chair for a few minutes afterwards. We consumed the information on the walls and finally got to the RFDS part of the facility. A retired plane is available to climb in and there are more VR presentations of a patient being transported to Adelaide and suffering multiple heart attacks.

After the RFDS, we again caught the shuttle, back to Fiddler's Green and had lunch ...oh and I had a Guinness.

After lunch, it was back across the Skybridge and a walk along the Esplanade past Government House and the NT Parliament.

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That was about it for the day, so we made a slow walk back to the bus interchange, as Sue's knee was ready to retire for the day. Back at the caravan park, we closed the day's activities with a dip in the pool.

So much done and yet, still so much to do.