This last week has proved both productive and very tiresome all in one. We spent the majority of it in Mooloolaba on 'The Greatest campsite in Australia' and so that softened the blow somewhat. Much of my time was wasted waiting for a response to my initial job enquiry and nursing my lame wife. Coupled with this I had the disagreeable task of having to deal with the campsite manager idiot. These characters truly are a breed apart. They come in both flavours, men and women but they are essentially the same creature. Usually quite chumpy with glasses, thinning hair [View Full Entry]

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Leaving Hervey Bay wasn't a difficult thing to do having spent maybe 4 days too many there. Destination Rainbow Beach. This thriving little seaside spot is another launch point for Fraser Island and famed for its rainbow coloured sands. The sand is indeed all the shades of the rainbow as long as the rainbow is only beige, orange and brown. It is still an attractive place especially when viewed from the Carlo Sand blow, a massive dune up on the cliffs with great vistas of the coastline. For some reason this is one of the beaches along the coast that is [View Full Entry]

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As a last gasp before reality hits I was very keen to get to the theme park belt of the Gold Coast hinterland. I suspected that Em wasn't quite as keen as I but gamely she came along without too much resistance. Ever since I made her go on 'Oblivion' at Alton Towers which left her a shaking sobbing wreck, Em has had an aversion to rollercoasters, perhaps understandably. Given the choice of many theme parks we settled on Warner Brothers Movie world. I figured that there would be enough film related guff to keep Em from getting too annoyed at [View Full Entry]

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We find ourselves in Airlie Beach, the launch point for trips around the splendid Whitsunday Islands. This is an interesting little town wholly populated by posers and backpackers with a few salty sea dogs thrown in for good measure. It seems that if you are not suntanned to within an inch of skin cancer then you clearly do not work on a boat or you have not been travelling long enough. Both of these circumstances render you largely second-class in the strange class system of Airlie. Many of the young Aussies here are, as the saying goes, far too cool for [View Full Entry]

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Here we are in the less than exciting harbour town of Hervey Bay having returned from Fraser Island to find the place in the full throws of Easter madness. It is tradition at Easter for whole communities to descend on such places and erect what can only be described as canvas cities housing many families with seemingly endless supplies of children. The men then sit around drinking weak lager, talking about cars and comparing beer bellies while the women try to outdo each other in the pitch of their screeching. I have decided that the collective noun for middle-aged Aussie women [View Full Entry]

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Well here I am actually holed up in Irvine waiting for the bloody rain to abate. I truly believe that we have brought the weather back with us from England but as they have been experiencing a very serious drought here then we probably shouldn't complain. That said, it is playing havoc with our camping. Anyway, due to technical jiggery pokery I am able to sit and write this and then simply upload it at an interweb café thus saving me a few dollars- watch the pennies and the boat payments will look after themselves and all that. So to [View Full Entry]

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Here we are back down under and continuing the adventure in our much loved van Irvine. We really have developed something of an unhealthy attachment to this 23 year old Nissan Urvan ( hence the startlingly imaginative name Irvine! ) but he has served us particularly well over the past 4 years. I have a suspicion that if Em had to choose between me and the van then I might be shown the door. We finally flew back to Oz on the 25th of February through the ever inefficient Heathrow and straight into Sydney after an unscheduled 5 hour holiday in [View Full Entry]

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Having thoroughly enjoyed the joys of the Whitsundays it was time to go budget for a night or two in order to eek out the funds. So we find ourselves in Cape Hillsborough national park campground just North of Mackay. This turned out to be a cracking little spot right on the beach. The one draw back with these cheap and cheerful campsites is that they attract a random set of customers. Quite often these include lone middle-aged men with no apparent reason to be camping. This night proved to be no exception with one such character telling us about a [View Full Entry]

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Well here's a turn up for the books, we are no longer in South America as the title may have given away. There are a number of reasons for our early departure from this part of the world but by far the dumbest is the simple fact that we failed to cancel an internal flight and the kind people at Lan airways took it upon themselves to cancel all of our onward flights including the incredibly overbooked leg from Santiago to Auckland. Long story short, we would have been stuck in South America for much longer than planned or budgeted for [View Full Entry]

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Next time you´re having a rubbish day at work I wan´t you to consider the life and death of the unfortunate Juanita. Juanita is the most well preserved ice mummy in South America and after 500 years she isn´t looking as bad as she might. Here is a girl raised to the age of 12 and kept pure and innocent for the sole purpose of being sacrificed to appease the mountain gods. When the time was right, Juanita was made to walk some 160 miles from Cuzco to the summit of mount Ampato in terribly difficult conditions. Once there she was [View Full Entry]

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