Darwin NT
Finally ventured out into the big smoke today, because it was a double whammy: the beer can regatta and the Mindil Beach markets at the same time. Mindil Beach was packed, they had a long row of huge sunshades erected for the spectators to sit under and watch the activities, and then there were 10,000 punters hanging about on the beach watching the action up close. The basic idea is to build a craft using beer cans and then race it around this course out into the bay. It certainly has the potential to be enormous, but a little bit of organisation would probably improve it tenfold. The program we had didn't correspond to what was actually happening at the time and the individual events (not the boat races) were a bit ad hoc with the organisers trying to get people to become involved. There didn't appear to be any teams ready and rearing to go. We did get to see the end of a boat race that seemed to have five boats competing but only two that were truly made of just cans, the o...