C'est la vie to the East Coast and g'day to Perth!!

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We’d finally reached the final leg of the east-coast road trip! Paul was quite keen to see the ‘official’ capital of Aus – Canberra so we swung by there for an afternoon. The drive there was kind of strange as it took us though endless areas of nothing as far as the eye could see! To be honest we could see why a lot of Aussies don’t give the city the best write up, you could tell it had all been designed a certain way on an architects drawing board and had no real history to it. We visited the parliament which was pretty cool, but got the feeling we were being closely watched by the loads of police guys surrounding it!

It was time to hit the road again but little did we know just what bad luck was in store for us. We were driving along on Good Friday to set up camp for the night at the next rest stop and before we knew it we were saying goodbye to Sheila a week earlier than we’d hoped. As we were both pretty shook up by what had happened we spent the Easter weekend hibernating in a lodge down at Lakes Entrance where we did nothing but watch dvds and chill out.

By the time Monday arrived it was time to face the real world again so we booked onto a 5 hour train journey to Melbourne (thinking what a breeeeze compared to some of the epic journeys in S.E. Asia) this positivity was ofcourse before the train was delayed for 3 hours half-way through the journey. Nice one! We weren’t complaining too much as all we had to look forward to that night was a 12 bed mixed dorm. Once the train finally pulled into the station in Melbourne around 10pm, it was time to put on our rucksacks (for what felt like the first time all over again) and walk for about 40 minutes to our hostel. When we arrived we were kindly told that we’d booked into their other hostel that just so happened to be right next to the train station we’d just left. Aaaaargh!! To say we were pissed off was an understatement! Here was us thinking we’d had all our bad luck for the year. It gets better… just as we’ve sat down in the hostel for 2 minutes it wasn’t long until we had a big fat sweaty guy happily stripping down to his pants right in front of Tina’s face! Oh how we missed Sheila so much already!!

Melbourne – what can we say? To be honest, not very much because we didn’t really see too much of it as we were too busy trying to sort out Sheila’s shenanigans! It did look as though it had a good atmosphere to the city and a festival feel so we’re hoping to sample some of that properly when we fly out from Melbourne in a few months time to New Zealand.

Well no one said our year away would all be plain sailing eh! But onwards and upwards and now we’re both really looking forward to getting on our flight to Perth, Western Australia, to see how this half of the coast lives and hopefully join them for the next 4 months or so!

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