We had been pleasantly surprised in New Zealand at how easily we found our rented campervan, Blanche. We therefore arrived in Sydney wondering whether we would be able to repeat the trick. It was unreasonable to hope for another mere five-hour search, but perhaps we could do it in five days?

Making it more difficult was the fact that we were buying rather than renting, and we wanted a 4x4 rather than the more plentiful estate cars and campers. On the plus side, it was the end of the main season and therefore a buyer's market.

We started our search the same day we arrived with a scouting mission around Kings Cross, where our hostel was located. We went first to Travellers Autobarn, which caters for the many backpackers who swarm around the area. As we expected, their vehicles were overpriced - even when considering the few extras they throw in. They wanted AU$8,000 for a Mitsubishi Pajero with loads of km on the clock and Katy knew from her research that that was way too much. After that, we headed to the 'rival' Kings Cross Car Market, where we met… The Don.

The Don is a former policeman turned businessman and he's far too important and larger than life to be called merely by his first name, 'Don'. He's the owner of the KCCM and told us he only deals with potential 4x4 customers rather than run-of-the-mill punters. He was a great fount of knowledge regarding the best places to drive off road around Australia and generously spent ages pointing them out to us on a map. The Don then showed us three very different Toyota Landcruisers - one tidy-looking GLX model and a couple of older, tougher-looking workhorses. Despite wide variations in age, mileage, condition and extras, they were all priced at… $8,000. Hmmm, we thought as we moved on.

The next day we started scouring the hostel notice boards and the streets around Kings Cross, looking for cars being sold at the kerbside - quite a common sight in Victoria Street in particular. There were quite a few vans and estate cars, but not many 4x4's. We therefore phoned a couple of possibilities Katy had found on the internet.

We must have decided to start at the bottom and work up, because the first car we saw was only $2,500 - about £1,250 - and even that was way too expensive for what it was. It was a Pajero with about a gazillion km on the clock, dilapidated bodywork, filthy and smelly. There was also the complication that the person named on the registration document had left the country about three years ago. Succeeding owners hadn't bothered to update the paperwork and the current guy explained this as a selling point - if we got any speeding tickets or parking fines we wouldn't have to pay as they would be sent to this long-departed Swede!

Ok, we thought, maybe we could put up with all that if the car drove like a dream. Oh dear, such naïve optimism! The owner took us out for a test drive and in some ways it wasn't too bad. Just one teensy problem. The car wouldn't engage first gear. The guy tried to disguise this fact, but every time he tried to get it into first he failed and had to ram it into second instead. I suppose it was to the car's credit that it coped pretty well, all things considering, but as to buying it… thanks, but no thanks.

Next up was another Pajero owned by a German girl called Gesa. This turned out to be not bad at all in that it hadn't done many km, wasn't in too bad condition and came with loads of extra equipment such as surfboards and even a guitar. She was taking it into a garage for a service and we went away to think about it while that was being done. The main problem was the $6,500 price tag which was more than we thought it was worth.

In the meantime, we headed out into northern Sydney to see another couple of vehicles. The first was a massively impressive Landcruiser with just about everything a serious 4x4 enthusiast would want. In many ways it would have been the ideal car to take on a tour of Australia's hidden parts, but for us it was over-specified in that we would probably never use half of its facilities. And all those extra goodies added up to an $8,500 price tag.

The next car was also a Landcruiser, but one that should barely be mentioned in the same blog as the previous vehicle. This one was a pop-top and had been converted to incorporate a small kitchen and a bed inside - a bit like a campervan. It had been all round the country with two guys, one of them about 6' 6" and the other no more than 5' 3". However, the car didn't just smell, it stank of mould inside. The engine was noisy and filthy and there were rust holes all around the body. As they say, we made our excuses to Little and Large and left. Our task was proving more difficult than we had hoped.

We next tried a $5,000 Land Rover Discovery. This looked promising at first in that it had low mileage and was very clean (in every sense of the word), though it was perhaps a little small in the back. Then we took it for a test drive. I had a go first and found it ok, though there was a raised storage compartment in between the front seats which made getting to the gear stick slightly awkward in that I kept knocking it with my elbow.

Then Katy took over and because she is much lower in the seat, my 'slightly awkward' became 'almost impossible' for her. To reach the stick, she had to reach up and over the intruding box. I think it's fair to say that her driving ability was not shown off to its best that day, as she stalled the Discovery about half a dozen times. The owner, who was in the front passenger seat, sat sweating as Katy attempted an uphill right turn, across traffic, with pedestrians streaming in front of and behind the car. "Go, go, just go!" he nearly screamed when there was a small break in the traffic.

We did go. And without buying the car.

One of the cars in Victoria Street with a For Sale notice in the window was a Pajero GLS which, unlike most vehicles for sale there, hadn't been converted for backpacker use. The owner, a Polish girl called Joanna, explained that she hadn't bothered to install a bed or even buy a tent. Instead, she had slept for the better part of six months on the back seat with her feet resting on a cool box! Joanna also told us about her adventures around the Outback, which included sleeping in a water tank at one point, and how she had driven from Uluru (Ayers Rock) to Perth on what was mainly an unsealed desert road.

Suitably impressed by the vehicle and her toughness, we went for a test drive and everything seemed fine apart from one thing. The steering wheel was so loose you could move it 2-3cm laterally to both left and right, and it made a strange noise when turned most of the way round. Joanna assured us that it hadn't been a problem and hadn't really noticed it until we mentioned it, but we thought it couldn't be normal and decided to get it checked out.

Getting a little out of time order for a moment, we took the car to a garage and told the mechanic about the problem. He looked a little puzzled at first, but when he drove the car into his work bay his expression changed to astonishment as he felt the movement. He did a safety check and found $1,700 worth of work which was needed anyway, but he couldn't put a price on what needed doing to the steering without really digging around. "Are you driving back to Kings Cross in that?" he asked. I nodded. "I'd get a taxi if I were you," was his damning reply. We didn't, but clearly that was another car crossed off the list.

Now comes the strangest part of our car-buying quest…

While looking for somewhere to test the above vehicle, we found a garage which had another Pajero for sale. We didn't use them for the test because they charged too much, but decided to take a look at the Pajero even though it had more than 400,000km on the clock. Temptingly, it drove like a dream and even though it was an older model and a bit small in the back, it wasn't too scummy. This had potential, we thought.

The mechanics in the garage explained that they didn't usually sell cars, but they had this one because a backpacker had brought it in for repairs (clutch, carburettor etc) and just left it when he couldn't pay for the work they had carried out. The story then started to get a little cloudy when we looked at the paperwork and found that these repairs had been done by the previous owner some time before. The garage's version then changed swiftly - they had carried out extensive servicing which the backpacker couldn't pay for. A very, very extensive service, we concluded.

Just to add another element of curiosity, while we were looking the car over, who should turn up for a chat with the staff but The Don. It seemed that he owned, or at least had some interest in, this garage. He had a lot of fingers in a lot of pies, it seemed.

All that aside, the vehicle could have been worse and with a price tag of $4,600 we thought we could work on that - especially if the strange story had any foundation in fact. We went back to the hostel and bumped into a German guy called Johannes whom I had talked to before about 4x4's as he had previously owned a Pajero and was an enthusiast.

We told him about this latest car and mentioned that it had done 418,000km. His head jerked up. "Was it white? The older model? With a wooden bed and shelves in the back? With a roof rack? Mud tyres on the rear?" he asked. We replied yes to all those questions. "That's my old car!" Johannes declared and proceeded to show us photos of it on his laptop. Far from leaving it at the garage because he couldn't pay the bill, he had sold it about three weeks ago to what he thought was just an ordinary Aussie punter. We suspected strongly from his description that the purchaser was one of the mechanics.

The slightly strange story offered by the garage was now distinctly muddy.

To satisfy our curiosity as much as anything, we returned to the garage the next day on the pretext of checking out the interior contents. The registration document still had Johannes' name on it. When we pointed this out and asked them how could they sell the car given that they didn't seem to be the official owners, they couldn't come up with a reasonable answer. Far too murky for us, we walked away again.

This lack of truthfulness by garages was something we had already heard about. There were various stories on the internet or relayed by word of mouth about 'lemons' and all of them involved cars bought from garages rather than from individuals.

Two more vehicles came and went. One was a Nissan Patrol with everything but the kitchen sink including fishing rod, body boards and footballs. It was ok and we might have got it for the right price, but it was just a bit too careworn. The other was a Landcruiser with a roof tent. This type of arrangement could have had lots of advantages in that we could go anywhere, unfold the tent and that would be it. On the other hand, we would have to put the tent down and up any time we drove anywhere, plus we would have to get something else to sit under. We decided against it in the end.

There was another disappointment when Gesa came back to us and said she wouldn't take less than $5,000. We were aiming at $4,000 with an absolute maximum of $4,500. If she had been leaving soon and therefore getting desperate we might have reached an agreement, but she was in Sydney for another few weeks so under no pressure to sell.

We then tried Travellers Mate, another commercial outfit aimed at backpackers, but a bit cheaper. They only had one 4x4 and it was too small, but the owner had a couple of useful snippets of information. The most interesting was that The Don didn't just own the Kings Cross Car Market, but Travellers Autobarn as well. The man clearly has more fingers and more pies than Mr Pukka!

Things were starting to get a bit worrying. We initially booked into our hostel for a week and had extended that for a further three days. How much longer would it take?

One of our routines was the constant checking of the internet for new listings. The staff at the hostel thought we were a bit sad - we were in lovely, lively Sydney and all we seemed to do was look at our laptop. But hard work tends to bring rewards and so it proved. We looked for the umpteenth time at a site called Gumtree and found a Pajero which had only been listed 13 minutes before. It was $4,500 fully equipped and sounded very promising. After a quick phone call to check a couple of details, we arranged to check it out the following morning at a campsite in northern Sydney.

The car was owned by a very nice Belgian couple called Sebastian and Marie, and initial impressions were good - no rust, clean inside and out (and even underneath!). We did the usual look under the bonnet (fairly pointless given our lack of useful knowledge) and trawled through the extra gear that came with the car (tent, sleeping bags, chairs, cooking pots etc and even SatNav). Interestingly, the car hadn't had a wooden bed installed in the back so still had all its seats. The owners then showed us that the rear seats could be folded and arranged to make a double bed if we wanted. (We just wished we could have told Joanna this as she presumably wasn't aware and had spent 6 months with her legs on a cool box!)

We checked through the paperwork and bills and everything looked good. When we took it for a short drive, it felt smooth and like a proper car (unlike the Landcruisers and Patrols, which handle like tanks) with no strange noises coming from the engine. The only real problem was that it had done a lot of mileage, though the Belgians were the first ones to use it as backpackers and it had obviously been well looked after both by them and the two previous owners.

We decided that this was the one and tried to haggle the price down a bit. We didn't get very far with that, because we were the first ones to look at the car, other people were coming to look at it and the owners didn't have a fixed, imminent departure date. In the end it boiled down to the fact that we felt we trusted what they said about the car and so after brief reflection, we decided to cough up the full $4,500 (£2,250)and that was pretty much that.

Sebastian and Marie wanted to do the transfer quickly so we left a deposit and carried out an online check to verify the car's details and make sure there were no outstanding fines or debts on the vehicle. As they wanted a hostel in Sydney and we wanted a campsite on the edges, we effectively swapped where we were all staying the next day. They even got the same room in Eva's that we vacated.

We'll let you know how we get on driving it, but of course you want to know what the car is called. We considered naming it after one of its previous owners, but eventually settled on Ramsey. No, not because of the celebrity chef, but we are in Australia aren't we? And Australia is the home of Neighbours, which is set in… Yes, Ramsey Street! Ok, blame Katy will you?!?!?

Richard