The road to Sydney is paved with many things….unfortunately none of them gold, but there you go! So our first stop was in a tiny town called Glenrowan. Now on paper this is not much more than a one horse town between Melbourne and Sydney, but throw into the equation the fact that it was the place where the infamous Ned Kelly was finally arrested on the 28th of June 1880 and it seems you have a licence to print money. Quite why this man is so famous for being the leader of a gang who robbed people and killed several, [View Full Entry]

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Wow! Seven Weeks since our last Blog!! Ooops! Sorry, time flies eh?! So anyway, what have we been up to, apart from dodging the rain and trying to keep warm?! We did, as planned in the last Blog, make it up to the Murray River to a lovely spot called Bourkes Bend (?!) but being right on the river it was freezing, we managed a couple of nights and gave up on the third morning when we found that the condensation on the inside of the windows had frozen! Don't let anyone tell you that the weather in Oz is always [View Full Entry]

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And so, sadly we left Linda in Port Augusta and headed off for Iron Knob once again. We managed to catch up with Judy but the other people that we had met including PJ and Michelle were off visiting people around Oz. Still we spent the afternoon with Judy and her two crazy dogs and then headed back to Port Augusta for dinner and the night. The following morning we set off for Broken Hill, a silver mining town just over the boarder into New South Wales. (Our 5th State!) Broken Hill was the setting for some of the film Pricilla [View Full Entry]

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Probably one of the weirdest places we've ever been to is Coober Pedy, roughly half way between Alice Springs and Adelaide. For about 40km each side of the town you drive through a surreal apocalyptic landscape of white conical mullock heaps and old machinery, signs warning of the presence of thousands of mine shafts, each dug in the hope of finding opals. Coober Pedy itself is a small, dusty town with a population of about 2,000. Previously it boasted over 40 different nationalities although this is down to about 20 or so now that many people have left to try mineral [View Full Entry]

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Arriving back into Darwin after our jolly in Bali, we eventually managed to convince the immigration officer that despite her intuition we really aren’t illegally working our way around Oz (and we’re really not!) and finally stamped in for another six months were reunited with Tilly, our van. Obviously upset that we’d abandoned her for a week, she’d decided to leak clutch and brake fluid everywhere. We managed to limp round to the caravan park we’d previously stayed in which was still locked up for the night, and so ended up sleeping on the side of the road for a [View Full Entry]

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One of the quirks of the Australian immigration service is that if you want to stay longer than your initial visa, they want you to spend some of your money in a different country for a while rather than just letting you pay a fee to them. Seems a bit stupid to us but that’s how we ended up in Bali for a week. We’ve always had an image of Bali as a sort of Benidorm for Aussies, cheap beer and t-shirts, and its never really been on our list of must-see destinations. It is however the easiest place to get [View Full Entry]

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So we last left you in Broome shortly after arriving there......Well Broome it's self didn't seem to have too much to offer, lots of shops selling pearls, and a huge beach (Cable beach)which you couldn't swim in cause of the 'stingers'! We did spend an evening on the beach to watch the sunset, as did everyone else staying in Broome, the beach was fairly packed with everyone sitting around in their deckchairs drinking wine. (nice enough work if you can get it!) So in an "if you can't beat 'em join 'em moment" we settled down alongside! Cable beach apparently has [View Full Entry]

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Well we survived the Cyclone....well actually it never actually arrived! Just rained cats and dogs for 3 days! So Coral bay being a bit of a wash out so to speak, we decided as soon as the road was reopened to head on up to Exmouth and the Ningaloo reef. We read about Exmouth before we were even in Australia as it is one of the few places in the world where Whale Sharks go past close to the coast and we had heard you could do a trip to swim with them. Whale sharks are the world’s biggest "fish"; they [View Full Entry]

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At the end of the last blog we said our final farewells to Pete and Nirbeeja and after travelling with them for nearly four weeks finally went our seperate ways. That was in Busselton, home to the longest wooden jetty in Western Australia. Or was it in the southern hemisphere? Or in the universe? We've been to so many places with the longest wooden jetty that we've lost track. Suffice to say, no tourist destination in WA is complete without a rickety wooden jetty, slightly fire damaged, to charge people to walk along. We’d met up with a couple in Esperance, [View Full Entry]

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Hello People!! Here we are again, actually not far from where we last left you. It would seem we are only about 130km from where we did the last blog two weeks ago! In fact we have slowed down considerably from the first weeks of our trip. Firstly we had actually planned to treck fairly fast as far as Adelaide, partly as we had done this route before, but also because it is not far from Melbourne and easy to do on a short trip. Anyway then we hit the Nullabor and really there is not too much to stop for [View Full Entry]

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