Well after Cape Le Grand we were a little worried that moving on would be a disappointment. Being unable to take Tilly into Stokes inlet due to the rough road we decided to head for Waychinicup National Park, about 550km further west. Having been introduced to National Park camping I think we are in danger of becoming addicted, the sites are all lovely, some have loos and showers but even the ones that don’t are in such idyllic settings it doesn’t matter! AND they are cheep, about $12 a night for the 2 of us, less than a fiver! We’d had [View Full Entry]

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Regular readers of our blogs will remember that we asked for ideas for a name for our van. Sheila and Matilda being the most popular, but cliched nominations, we finally settled on Tilly, short for the more common Matilda. Now we're going to start a new competition. The redback spider that lived in our gas cupboard until we evicted her, well killed her, seems to have left us a present of some babies to adopt. Apparently they produce something like 12 egg sacks, each full of 250 eggs. So we're after about 3,000 names, each preferably starting with R for redback. [View Full Entry]

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Well after four weeks staying at Claire's sister's house, we're finally off on our long trip. We spent our first night just half an hour away in Kooweerup. Meaning "black fish swimming" in the local aboriginal language, this area was originally swampland but has been drained to provide farmland and is now famous for its asparagus, apparently asparagus icecream is available locally! Claire's cousin Tony and his wife Val live here, and on the way round to theirs we popped into Caldermead Dairy Farm for a milkshake. Arriving just in time to watch the cows being milked our first sight, and [View Full Entry]

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Yep.....shes called Tilly! She arrived on Thursday 10th January at 5pm weighing in at 3.5 tonne! Well we thought we had better go out on a dry run in her before heading off into the never never, besides which a "christening" was a good excuse for a lovely weekend of food and wine with Tony, Val and Beau. We found a lovely spot only about an hour away and settled into Life With Tilly! Well i think we can safely say we are gonna love it! She is really comfortable and there is loads of space. We found there was a [View Full Entry]

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So the campervan we were looking at was deemed as a “No Go” by our mechanic, and so it was back to the drawing board, well the internet and hunting again! I think we’ve driven through most of the Mornington Peninsular looking at campervans by now. We’d seen a couple that weren’t bad but none that were really calling to us (if you know what I mean!) Then on Sunday a new ad appeared on one of the websites. Strangely the owners live Langwarrin (where we are) Fate??! Well we hot footed it over there and instantly fell in love! Marcus [View Full Entry]

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Happy Christmas from Australia! We're planning to stay here for ten months apart from a quick trip over to New Zealand to renew our visa. At the moment we're staying in Claire's sister Frances' house in Langwarrin, a small town 30 miles south-east of Melbourne on the Mornington Peninsular. Three days after we arrived, Frances, Paul and Jay left for the UK (what they trying to tell us?!) so we're house and dog sitting for a couple of weeks. Its nice to settle somewhere for a while and pretend that we're householders again - wouldn't want to do it for ever [View Full Entry]

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Right, ok i know last time we were boasting about how good we were being with the old blog up-dates.....You all knew it wouldn't last right??! So almost 5 weeks on (sorry! time fly's eh!) Not really sure where to start now! Right.... 16th Nov Caught the ferry from Kota Kinabalu to Labuan an Island just off the coast of Borneo. The day we arrived was a friday, not that we'd noticed as have completely lost track of days at this point, anyway, being Friday it seemed that the whole of Malaysia had descended on this little island for the weekend. [View Full Entry]

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OK, I have to apologise before i start because i am seriously gonna GUSH!!! WOW wow wow! We have just returned to Kota Kinabalu after 3 days in the Jungle and then 5 days investigating Mabul and Sipadan Islands. We managed to find a really reasonable tour to visit the Kinabatangan river to do a jungle stay. The company even collected us from the backpackers in Sandakan for the 4 hour drive to the lodge for Rm15 (2 quid) each! We had booked to stay in the dorm at the lodge but there was a cabin available when we arrived and [View Full Entry]

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Didn't really expect to be doing another blog entry quite so quickly but we find ourselves staying in a fantastic little hotel in Sandakan which as well as having China's answer to Basil Fawlty for an owner also has the best internet connection we've ever found. Just to re-cap, we'd been staying for a week in Shangri-La Rasa Ria resort, Kota Kinabalu. Probably one of the most slickest run hotels we've ever stayed at, we were met at the entrance by a small army of perma-smile stunningly attractive staff. At the crash of a gong we were played into the hotel [View Full Entry]

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Well here we are in Malaysia, we left on the 16th and landed in Kuala Lumpa were we spent the first 5 days. KL is an impressive city with some amazing buildings, and despite the fact that i am not a “city person” i actually really like KL. We spent the first 2 nights in a very nice (expensive) hotel right next to the Petronas Towers. The view from our window on the 23rd floor out over the city was great, we actually went to sleep with the curtains open so we could look out at the millions of lights! OK [View Full Entry]

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