From Hobart, I was headed back to Melbourne with a flight from Launceston. My plan to see Cradle Mountain fell apart when I realised it was the last weekend of school holidays, and all accomodation there was fully booked. When I had initially arrived on Tasmania it was beautiful weather - and looking out onto the rain swept streets of Hobart I could only visualise sunny Launceston. Even though all the weather reports showed it to be poor weather across the entire island, I had faith that the sun was shining in Launceston - and so bought a ticket back there. For once my instincts were right - I arrived and instantly the slightly depressed feelings that had been welling up in Hobart disappeared. It was great.  Due to the previous weeks bad weather, the gently ... read more

My next destination was to be the uninhabited island of Maria, just off the East Coast of Tasmania. After an overnight stop in Triabunna, eating home-baked biscuits in front of a log fire in the hostel, I took the ferry to the island. Maria once held a number of convicts, and the accomodation available on the island was a tent or the old penetentiary. The choice was easy to make. The room in the penetentiary was around 3 by 4 metres and held six bunks,although in the days of the convicts there would have been around fifty men sleeping in hammocks strung across the room. Far from the luxury of the hostels I had been staying in, the penetentiary only had a table, complete with beer bottle and candle for light, and an old wood stove ... read more

Canberra is a purpose built capital, and it is apparent in the atmosphere of the city. The endless stream of government buildings and national headquarters make it feel like one giant industrial estate. The sheer amount of land Canberra occupies in relation to the number of people who live there (many who work there can't face living there and are located in Sydney) causes the place to be incredibly quiet. Visiting just after New Year, when many were still on holiday, the whole place was a ghost town. In the middle of the day it was possible to be the only signs of life around - no cars, no pedestrians, nothing. Canberra does however have many national tourist attractions. The Parliament House, the National Gallery, the National Museum and just about every other National you could ... read more

Getting to Australia proved to be more tiring than I had imagined, and involved a lot of waiting around. The reason was that in my wisdom I had decided to get to Singapore from Bangkok by train for my flight. The journey involved : - Three seperate trains each of around 12 hours Two stop-overs in train stations of 12 and 10 hours The crossing of three borders. After this the 8 hour flight was nothing, in fact it was the least stressfull time I had had in the past three days. Initially it was strange to be back in a 'western' country, as obviously there was a completely different feel to the city of Sydney than there was to any of the cities I had visited in Asia - and it took me a few ... read more