Darwin is full of Priuses!

I had to go to Darwin last week for a conference, which is why I haven't posted for ages.

For those of you who don't know, Darwin is in the middle of nowhere. It's the capital of the Northern Territory. The city has a population of 120,000, and the closest town as big as Darwin is Dili, the capital of East Timor, a two-hour flight away. The closest decent-sized Australian city would be Adelaide or Brisbane, and both are a four-hour flight away.

The Northern Territory, of which Darwin is capital, has 233,000 people in an area the size of Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Denmark combined. So it's kind of empty. And it's traditionally had a "frontier town" image, as the front page of the newspaper suggested the day I arrived (Bum flash blamed for highway rollover | News | NT News | Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia | ntnews.com.au).

So I wasn't expecting much on the car front - lots of Land Cruisers and lots of utes. But no! The city is full of Priuses. With the exception of one Aurion and a few HyCams, all the taxis are Priuses. Truly it was a car paradise. I didn't get the chance to take any pictures, but here's one I found.



They're even the same colour as mine!

This is clearly quite an old picture, as they now have loads of Gen IIIs as well, in dark blue. A higher proportion of taxis were Priuses in Darwin than in Tokyo and Kyoto, where I went at Christmas.

I got a lot of taxis when I was there- at the end of a Northern Territory conference, you're not in any shape to walk. Several of them were Gen IIs, and most had 600,000 - 800,000kms on them. And the drivers said they'd never had a problem: one said that in 800,000kms, he'd had routine services, and he'd replaced the wiper blades and the tyres and topped up the aircon fluid, and done nothing else at all. Darwin's got a very wet tropical climate, so I thought this was very impressive.

Also, Darwin was much nicer than I was expecting - I'd highly recommend it if you're looking for a very small city in the middle of nowhere.