Day 47/55. Darwin. Accommodation Disappointment

It had taken until week 5 of the trip until we found our first real disappointment in our accommodation. Unfortunately, it was the place we had booked the longest to stay at. With Joel and Alex coming, we need a two bedroom apartment to stay. We had booked a place in Palmerston, about 20 mins out of Darwin which suited, as it was closer to a few of the sights we wanted to see and a bit easier to get around.

In walking into what was advertised as a two bedroom apartment\unit, we walked into a studio type set up where the second bedroom was partitioned by a screen cable tied to a clothing rack. The kitchenette, was actually external which I hadn’t really cottoned onto the full extent of until I told Linda I washed my sandals in the laundry trough and she pointed out it was the kitchen sink. The kitchen was facing onto the pool, which is OK I guess, but also open to any other guest that may be staying there – which would be OK if I thought they may come and do our dishes. The small toilet/shower room was OK, other than the shower curtain not reaching the floor causing a flood, and an annoying bloody shelf beside the shower, which was bumped every time I stood to pee in the toilet. The changeroom, I guess you would call it, next to the little toilet/shower, was spacious, but also allowed anyone who may be attending the external washing machine to look in. To get into the toilet/shower, the occupants of the other “bedroom” either had to go through the master bedroom, or go externally through the kitchen and back into the change room – which meant we would have had to have the external door unlocked at night, which wasn’t an option. Thank goodness for young strong bladders as the occupants of the second “bedroom”.

The lighting in the kitchen on the first night flickered continually until almost staying on all of the time. The second night, the lights didn’t work at all. This was problematic as I was set up to start cooking dinner on the bbq I had just cleaned for 30 minutes, and then couldn’t see. After a hastily ordered uber eats meal, and complaint, the electrician came the next day and found that ants had infiltrated their entire lighting system outside, and he couldn’t fix the switch, so he hard wired the light on overnight, giving a warm glow through the translucent door, to the two occupants of the second bedroom who didn’t have a bedroom door to shut. Upon fixing the light permanently, it was thoughtfully replaced by an orange bug resistant fluorescent which may have kept the bugs away, but made it really difficult to see what you were washing in the kitchen trough.

We didn’t even get to mention that the pool filter system was installed on the wall outside of the master bedroom, and was on a timer to come on from 4am until 6:20 every morning. Some things were raised, and some things were fixed, like the shower curtain and the visibility into the change room (tea towels pegged to the outside of the window) but by this stage there was too much to point out, and nowhere to go as the Darwin festival had made accommodation hard to find in the first place. The biggest disappointment was the layout, and what had been misrepresented in the ad. In the end, Joel and Alex didn’t complain and we decided the important thing was that we were spending this time together – and that was what we enjoyed the most. We are still waiting for the feedback form from booking.com.