hotel

I’m at Darwin airport, leaving this place for the third and final time. I hope not to be back, unless it’s to pick up a hire car and escort my good woman direct from airport to Kakadu.

For a person who likes home, I’m amazed at the number of hotels and motels I have now slept in. Ten years ago I can count them on less than five fingers. Now I need twenty hands.

The serious hotel-hopping begins with long-distance bike rides: Bourke to Melbourne, Adelaide to Melbourne, and three times round Tasmania. Three sojourns in France add international perspective. My new job ticks the numbers over.

The three worst hotels leap out even in distant memory: the lumpy mattress on the floor at the Coleraine Hotel to avoid the stifling heat, mozzies and sagging bedsprings; the lampshade perched on my bonce at the Sea Lake Hotel as I read in bed; the mystery plumbing—toilet, basin, bidet?—under my window in the utterly shambolic Moderne in Clermont, France. In defence of each I admit that the tariff justified what I got for my money.

There is no best place. Whether in Cobar or Hobart, hotel rooms are bland and charmless, no matter how shiny, no matter how management dresses them in spin, no matter how many complimentary blandishments are on offer. The miniature toiletries, sachets of hot chocolate and pillow menus are recouped by the tiny six-dollar bag of mini-bar peanuts the famished traveller wolfs down at midnight after a long flight and no sustenance till breakfast.

Hotel breakfasts never vary: they’re universally awful and breakfast in the Waterhole Restaurant at the Darwin Central is no disappointment. Usually I break my overnight fast with the not-the-slightest-bit Continental breakfast. This morning I vary my practice and go for the ‘full’ breakfast—scrambled eggs, grilled tomatoes and mushrooms. 

The Australian Continental consists of cereal, toast, out-of-season fruit, with a gelatinous ‘product’ called yogurt thrown in to provide a European touch. As little as a bowl of corn flakes and a small glass of tinned pineapple juice will relieve you of $15 to $20.

The better option by far is to stroll up the street and invest less for the big breakfast at a café, where you’ll probably score a decent glass of freshly-squeezed orange juice, and your scrambled eggs will come out of a chook, not a tin.

My driver this morning is Satya, from Nepal. I ask if he’s a doctor or engineer whose qualifications are not recognised here. No, he says, he’s an accountant, and can’t get a job because he has no experience. No experience, no job. No job, no experience. I wish him well.

The day’s training at the Darwin Sailing Club passes and I am where I said at the beginning: Darwin airport. Flight DJ1464 lifts off on time and somewhere over the dead heart of the continent I swipe my credit card through the slot in the back of the seat and watch the Blues beat Freo.

Rock on, Blueboys.