Good news - we made the flight to Australia on the right day! What a cheap skate airline Jet Star are though, not so much as a bloody cup of tea on an 8hr flight. To make matters worse they put the air-con on full blast and charged $8 for a blanket, we protested by spending the entire flight with our arms stuffed inside our t-shirts, and my feet in my hand bag - that'll teach them! Really I should sue them for potentially cauding hypothermia (not that I'm a drama queen). When we stepped outside we realised it was just in preparation for the mightily cold aussie weather, which I really hadn't planned for, in hindsight I could have checked the weather, but just assumed it would be hot! I also hadn't thought about going through the customs when I suddenly remembered my tea bags (that yes I have carried from home) could be massively suspect, and I might face a $60,000 fine, or worse they could be confiscated and I'd be left without any real tea!! Luckily our inspection guy couldn't even spell tea bag, so just waved them through.

Next challenge, finding our hotel which the information chap did without an issue then told us the cheapest way to get there was a shuttle bus that cost $50! Considering how much the aussie dollar is worth now, that was a shock to the system! I think I prefer the Indian system where the taxi driver has no idea where he's going but it will only cost you £2! So having found the hotel, we were told they didn't have our booking, then we were told they did and we'd been upgraded, yay! Then later we had a knock at the door we were told our booking was cancelled and that it was going to cost us an extra $7, we negotiated to $5 - then checking the credit card statement we saw the company we booked with Web-jet, had withdrawn the money then re-credited it at lower rate where we lost yet anther £3. Basically Australia's not a cheap place to come anymore!

The city of Melbourne is like a mesh of European cultures, fused together with embracive attempt at modern art. We have the backstreets of French cafe's, the food markets of Spain, and the same architect responsible for London's Canary Wharf. A few pubs have been thrown in to the mix, with many confidently overpriced restaurants, offering some nice sounding food, but you can't help thinking somebodies been copying down Gordon Ramsay's book on the menu board! In retrospect it lacks Australian essence, not that I was hoping for streets filled with Walkabouts, but a touch of the brash Australian that we all secretly like, wouldn't go a miss.

In consequence to the cost of living here we have been busying ourselves with trying to find a van to live out. Having seen quite a few advertised most asking in the region of $4000 to $5000 aud, for a mid 80's rust bucket, thats had 5 new engines and the exhaust hanging off! We've had a look at a few, all had been named and personalised the best I think was 'Mopel the whale' she was a bit beaten up though and had done the good deed of taking out a parking metre a few days before! We've found one called Herbie from the mid 90's at least thats been around the block a bit, but we think he'll do the job of getting up the east coast, without to much trouble, touch wood! I did negotiated a grand off the price although I still think we paid too much!

Having finally bough Herbie the first most important thing to do was changing the name as he wasn't a white beatle and certainly didn't drive himself, not so much as bloody power steering in fact. This in mind we renamed him Bruce the Gecko! His first outing was to the Yara valley wine area, outside Melbourne. We headed to one of the free campsites on our map, near the town of Yara Glen, having failed to find it we headed back to the (very small) town, and shared a slightly overdone steak, and attempted to seek some local knowledge of where this place was. Without any avail to the whereabouts of this camping spot, we were told that there was a nearby lake where some chose to camp, although illegal (not that anyone was checking), thats where we spent our first very cold night.

We were woken up by a kangaroo banging on the window the next morning, which was thick with fog. It was freezing our teeth were chattering under piles of blankets with every warm piece of clothing we owned on. It wasn't the most invigorating start to the day, but at least we made a move early to get warm. After a few hours the sun had burned off the fog, and made for a perfect day of visiting wineries around the valleys, with stark blue skies, that would fool you in to thinking it was a summers day! We found a campsite near the town of Healsville that was a steep $33 per night but it did have hot showers and a kitchen, as well as no threat of being arrested or fined! Which meant we spent the first of many evenings to come sitting outside in blankets, drinking boxed wine, staring at the amazing sky, and talking rubbish mainly about the universe.

After another day of swinging from winery to winery, to cheese farm, we made a start south towards Philip Island. Stopping at the rather historic town of Loch, that hadn't seemed to change since the 1950's, we spent the night in the local cricket ground car park. When we reached Philip island we were a bit miffed they were charging over $20 to see there famed 'penguin parade' - which is merely penguins walking across the beach to there onshore nests, and a purely natural occurrence which is cheeky for anyone to be charging for in the first place, especially that amount! I did go and see it and there wasn't even that many penguins, probably because of all the lights and people staring a them. What really took the piss was the penguins plus, where you get to spend another $20 and maybe see a couple of extra penguins, what is funny is that people actually pay it!We also went to see the Koalas, at the sanctuary they have for them there, which was a much more reasonable $10 each, and we seemed to choose a good hour for seeing them move and feed a bit, which was lucky as they sleep for 20 hours of the day.

From there we headed back to Melbourne, and started to encounter a bit of a problem with the brakes, which progressed into quite a big problem by the time we reached Melbourne, as the van was beginning to sound like a tram every time I braked. Fortunately for us we went to meet some of Al's more distant Family, who kindly offered to have a look at the issue for us. A new problem raised when we tried to take the wheel off, some git had put the wheels on with a drill and impossible for a human to get off, and later at the garage we discovered they had put them on with strange screws that come off the opposite direction and our hitting them with a sledge hammer in thet normal direction had broken them, doh! So now the family have kindly taken us in with a bit of cooking and grouting mosaics in return! Hopefully it will be fixed without too much cost fingers crossed tomorrow.

More updates coming soon... watch this space.