Australia - a new continent to explore

I finally made my way to the other end of the world - Darwin, Australia. Much excitement accompanied me as everybody is just into that Australia thing...Thus, having a good feeling I boarded my plane at around midnight which I almost missed because of all those extra security checks - felt like flying to the US. I arrived early in the morning and the customs took me apart completely. Well, gotta admit that it was my fault after all because I had some instant noodles containing eggpaste in my carry-on luggage. Honest as I was I ticked "yes" on the immigration card, yes, I have dried food. Wrong!!! Should have left this damn thing in the plane and tick "no". It took me about an hour to get through customs and in the end they knew everything about me, my contents of my backpacks and whether I had contact to drugs...I checked into the YHA in Darwin, got the last bed so I was lucky this time. However, I realized that the YHAs are not better than any other hostel...After relaxing a bit I did some stuff I had to do, buy food, get a cellphone number, tax number and that sort of stuff you need when you wanna work in Australia. This little excursion was a shock to me because I realized that I was again in a Western culture and not in Asia anymore. The culture shock made me rather unhappy and Australia just "pissed me of". I bought a pizza and arriving at the YHA I was going to the kitchen to put it into the oven, this delicious piece of food. Next thing that went wrong: Most hostels do not have ovens, that meant that I had to prepare the pizza in the microwave...Not a good thing to do, but at least it was not frozen anymore. After my exciting pizza experience I met some guys from cologne, my first social contact. They were leaving for the Kakadu National Park the next day so I also booked the two day tour for 200 euros. That is what you do when you arrive in a new country the first days are always the most expensive ones. The trip was quite nice because I saw some aggressive crocodiles, amazing animals, and some nice nature spots which however, are also found in South East Asia. This nationalpark is the second most visited and everybody told me it is a must but after all I thought it was nice, but a must is a little exaggerated. So that pissed me of and also the fact that the whole backpacker scene here in Australia is based on companies selling trips which are way to expensive and take all the money from the poor backpackers...I hate it, backpacking is a way to travel as cheap as possible around the world, but nothing like that in Australia. And it is a fact: Australia has gotten lots more expensive within the last few years. After five days in Darwin I made my way to Alice Springs and hoped that things would change to the better...