Well summer is over, the weather is noticeably cooler, and we have lost our long evenings with the end of daylight saving. On the other hand, the leaves are all turning yellow and red, the grass is finally becoming green again, and autumn is a nice time of year to be in this part of Australia. Back in Melbourne, we got the Landcruiser damage assessed - rather surprised to find it would take over a week to repair!- so we decided to make the most of our extra time in Melbourne, and the rental car provided as part of our insurance. [View Full Entry]

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On arrival in Hobart (March 30th), we checked into the Youth Hostel for 2 nights. Had an interesting conversation with the YHA receptionist about Tasmanians and their shortcomings (according to her, the gene pool is far too small) - we thought she was rather prejudiced, but on our next outing to a local shopping mall we noted that there were quite a few interesting characters around! We didn’t really warm to Hobart, and the cold weather there probably didn’t help. Went out and bought some trackpants and beanies in the morning, then did a tour of the Cascade Brewery, Australia& [View Full Entry]

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The West Coast of Tassie is different - it’s commonly known as the west coast wilderness and some parts of the region, particularly the south-west corner, have never been explored to date. Interesting! We noticed the change as we drove from the North Coast through the tall forests to the mining towns of Rosebery and Zeehan and beyond. The drive was interesting, thick native beech trees that seem to meet in the middle of the winding, mountainous roads, to mining towns that appeared out of the misty cold rain and low clouds! We stopped for the night at Zeehan, and were [View Full Entry]

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After saying farewell to Alister and putting our caravan into storage, we were ready to head off to Tassie! We took the Spirit of Tasmania ferry across on Easter Thursday (20 March), a day trip of 10 hours plus - it is a long way from the mainland, something we weren't really aware of before now. Day trips are only during summer weekends and peak times, so we were quite lucky to get the chance to experience this, especially the trip across Port Philip Bay which takes about 3 hours!! A wee bit rough but not too bad. We spent the [View Full Entry]

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Forgot to post some photos of our 4 wheel drive course onto the web! Some of you may find them interesting.... we certainly found it an interesting day, and did things we never dreamed we could do in a car! (driving I mean...) Didn't get photos of our sand, mud and water crossings which were also great fun! [View Full Entry]

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Back in Melbourne again, we set up the caravan annexe for Alister’s visit and collected him from the airport. Had a great week in Melbourne - the Moombah festival was on when we arrived so we went down to Southbank on the river Yarra to see the fireworks and wander around the festival sideshows. Visited the Queen Vic market and Alister did a tour of the T elstra Dome. Wednesday we did a day trip down to Werribee Open Range Zoo, and out to Queenscliff on the Bellarine Peninsula, the head of Port Philip Bay. Then the highlight for Alister - [View Full Entry]

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Well here we are in Tasmania, and I have finally sat down to update our travelblog! After our first stay in Melbourne, we headed down to Gippsland for 9 days, then returned to meet Alister on March 9th. He came over for the Grand Prix car racing, more on this later! Anyway, Gippsland is really south east Victoria, and probably best known is Lakes Entrance, but there’s lots more! First stop was Philip Island, well known for its famous fairy penguin parade, which we skipped, but we did see penguins nesting at The Nobbies, a wild coastal headland with lots of [View Full Entry]

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Well we have been on the road for 5 weeks today - and have covered a lot of miles since we left Perth on Feb 1st, over 6,000 kilometres in fact! Our rather speedy trip from Perth to Melbourne was mainly due to our decision to go to the Santana concert on the 26th and Alister arriving in Melbourne for the Grand Prix car race this coming Sunday. So after leaving the tip of the Eyre Peninsula, we drove up the east coast of the peninsula to a sleepy country town called Wilmington, just north of Port Augusta. Wilmington is nestled [View Full Entry]

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Well it has warmed up a bit since our last blog, in fact I think it hit 40 degrees yesterday - a bit too hot for us Wellingtonians! We enjoyed our last port of call, Streaky Bay, very much - had 5 days there - until the wind drove us onwards! And they say Wellington is windy…. Streaky Bay was named by the explorer Matthew Flinders because of the colours of the water. We spend some time trying to catch crabs off the jetty with no success, but we went out to gather razor fish a couple of times, these are [View Full Entry]

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Since our last blog, we have been having fun finding out more about how our caravan works, we have crossed the Nullarbor, and we are now in South Australia! We ended up spending 4 nights in Kalgoorlie, loved it, it’s a real frontier outback town, and the centre of the Goldfields. There is a lot of history there from the Gold Rush, and we spent some time trying to find out what happened to Blu’s great grandfather Maurice who reportedly had the largest salt water distillation plant in Kalgoorlie at one time, until he went broke, probably when the water pipeline [View Full Entry]

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