Wedding weekend

I've got very behind with the blog, we've had such a busy time since the lead up to our son's wedding, which took place in Darwin, on 13 December.  A group of ten of us flew up to Darwin on 11 December - a four hour flight.

Australia is such a vast country, and although much of its interior is red desert, I could see some wonderful patterns in the landscape below us, some are man made,

but most are spectacular natural landforms.

 

The colour of the heart of Australia looks like this!  Beautiful!

My two other children travelled from Scotland to celebrate their brother’s wedding.  The two boys hadn’t seen each other for four years, and in fact we had not been together as a family for that time, so it was all eagerly anticipated.  We had a joyous reunion at the airport!

This is the wet season in Darwin.  In Australia, that part of the country is referred to as the top end.  Very hot, very humid, and at this time of the year, not a comfortable place to be!  The wedding was held outside and thankfully the normal pattern of weather for 6 o’clock in the evening, i.e. a thunderstorm and a deluge of rain, didn’t happen!  The bride’s arrival, on her father’s arm, with our little granddaughter as her flower girl, was accompanied by bagpipes – a little bit of Scotland which was a welcome sound to me, although probably took a few of the local Aboriginal community by surprise!   

We were in Darwin for four days, and of course there are some attractions you cannot miss if you are a visitor to that part of the world, namely the crocodiles!  We took the wee girl to see some snappy-snappies!  She loved it!  She had no fear of the “monsters” at all!  She even held a baby one, giving it a kiss on the end of its nose before handing it back to the keeper!  (Croc's mouth touth taped shut, btw!).

 A festive skeleton

and a live croc called Axel, 5.1 metres long, with rather larger teeth than the baby croc we saw earlier!

Look out!  He's behind you!!!!

And of more interest to me, some of the lovely flowers of Darwin!  The frangipani is one of my favourites.  It has a lovely glossy leaf, and the flowers have the most delicious scent.  They seemed to at their blooming best when we were there.

Below, spider lilies, Hymenocallis, a very strange looking flower indeed.

Just before we left Darwin I visited the town's Chinese temple.  It was in a pretty basic corrugated shed like building, but peaceful and very colourful inside.

I asked if it would be alright for me to take photographs, and the gentleman who showed me into the temple told me that they were Taoist, and that their religion was very carefree, and of course it would be fine for me to take photos!  I loved that sense of being care free!