If you’re visiting Darwin in the dry season (& from what I hear about the wet season, you definitely should visit in the dry) a trip to Mindil Beach Markets is a non-negotiable.
As you can probably gather from the above photo, the big attraction here isn’t necessarily the markets. While the sprawling collection of (mostly food) stalls is hard to beat, they’re merely there to fill your belly while you wait for the real show.
The markets are held on Thursday & Sunday evenings with hoards of locals and tourists alike hitting the beach from around 5pm onwards. We spread out a tarp between families building sandcastles and tucked into a ripping good laksa (which you may recall from my Week of Eats Darwin round up) and a few cheeky rice paper rolls.
It’s a reasonably long beach so as long as you get there early enough, there’s plenty of room to spend the afternoon relaxed with friends and family, regardless of how many kids are flicking sand about. Tip: Don’t forget your sunnies! Otherwise you’ll have stinging retinas until sundown.
I took so many photos as the sun was setting – it was tough culling a handful down to put in this post! Watching the sun set over the water is probably the most magical thing about Darwin.
You don’t realise how different it is to our east coast sunsets until you’re sitting there watching the fire in the sky gradually slide into the ocean.
With the tide all the way out, there were some amazing photo opportunities and I certainly wasn’t the only one lining up my camera on the sand! For any DSLR camera users, the settings that I found gave the best results for the sunset were shutter speed of 1/15 (this was when it was on the tail end of the sunset), aperture of f/16 and an ISO of 100. The only photoshopping the above image received was to shrink it down to size – things don’t really get more photogenic than that!
Darwin really gave us so many back-to-nature experiences (check out our Litchfield National Park trip) and this was definitely the most impressive sunset I’ve ever seen.
Have you witnessed a Darwin sunset? What’s you tip for best ever sunset?
