Most of our blogs have concerned the things we have seen or done, but in the past couple of weeks we have done very little apart from working hard to sell the car. Katy is writing about that separately, so what does that leave me? Just a couple of anecdotes and the opportunity to write about other people, including another opportunity to rant about scummy backpackers!

Back in Sydney, we stayed once again at the Sheralee camp site in the suburb of Rockdale, where we had spent Christmas and New Year. Then, the camp had been so full that tents were practically touching: if a neighbour broke wind in the night, you didn't just hear it, you felt the vibrations. This time, there was much more room and we erected our large tent because we wanted to spread out a bit. Unfortunately, that proved to be a mistake.

While in the centre of Sydney one afternoon, we felt the wind come up suddenly and strongly, blowing leaves and dust everywhere. As we halted at traffic lights on the way home, I could feel the car swaying in the wind. It didn't bode well and so it proved. When we drove into the camp we were greeted by the sight of our tent almost completely flat; only the storage boxes inside stopped it looking like a pancake.

We surveyed the damage and discovered that three out of the four structural poles had broken, tearing great holes in the fly sheet. As we have observed before, Oztrail is a crap brand. Just to make things worse, the heavens opened - heavily but thankfully briefly - while we worked out what we needed to do.

After the rain subsided, I lifted up the fly while Katy crawled inside and retrieved our bedding and clothes, followed by all the hardware. A helpful fellow-camper took things from us and put them inside the car. The most annoying aspect was that I'd washed the bedding two days before and a whole load of clothes just that morning. Most of it was unpleasantly damp and also dirty from the dust blown in by the demi-gale.

With the Oztrail fit only for the bin, we reverted to our smaller tent, which we pitched in a less exposed area. The location also had the advantage of being nearer the TV room and its sofas in case the wind increased during the night and made us properly homeless.

Once settled we looked around to see who else had suffered. All the small two- and three-person tents were fine: bowing in the wind and with ropes flying, perhaps, but still intact. But both the larger tents - including ours - had been severely damaged. The other one belonged to a British couple called Neale and Beverley and we knew they were out climbing Sydney Harbour Bridge. They had also spoken about going out for the evening afterwards. They were due for a nasty shock when they got back.

Feeling rather sorry for them, we had a closer look and found that only one pole had broken and pierced the fly sheet. We therefore protected the tent from further damage by taking it down flat and taping up the hole to keep the water out. The site manager also found a spare tent for them to sleep in if necessary, but when they returned the wind had died down. The pair of them replaced the broken pole section and put their tent back up again, which we thought was no mean feat in the dark.

Neale and Beverley proved to be very grateful by buying us beer the next day and also when they fetched up at a bar in Victoria Street, where we were selling the car. They were there because it was their last night in Sydney before flying on to New Zealand.

Just after we arrived, we were all joined by three other people from the camp. This led to a big row with the bar staff, by the way, because they wanted to bill us as a single table even though we were separate groups who were only sitting together because they had asked us to in order to save space. We were immediately suspicious of their motives, knowing it's easy to be overcharged in that situation because it's impossible to keep track of who's drunk what. Our advice? Avoid Roy's Famous Bar on Victoria Street.

Neale and Beverley, by the way, were not in the 'scummy backpacker' category I mentioned at the start; they were excellent company, in fact.

Another good guy we came across in Rockdale was Garth, a Canadian in his late 50s who was on a major cycling tour. Yes, I know I've branded trans-Australian cyclists as mad in the past, but Garth was only slightly demented and only in a good way! He was on his own, re-travelling a route he had taken 20 years before and kept us entertained for several evenings with anecdotes from his past.

The three of us went to the cinema one evening to see an Australian film called Bran Due Dae. This was a homespun Aboriginal musical set in Western Australia - think Mamma Mia! with a different colour palette featuring darker skin and red-orange earth.

We particularly wanted to see the film because much of it was made in and around Broome, where we spent a lot of time. All the interior pub shots were taken inside our favourite bar - Matso's - though it was only just recognisable when dressed up as an old-fashioned Aussie bar in the 60s. The whole film made us feel very nostalgic for the region, our favourite in the whole of Australia.

So who are these 'scummy backpackers' I've been going on about? While in Raglan in New Zealand we had come across a group of young people we dubbed the 'scummy surfers' because of the way they left everything dirty and seemed oblivious to the fact that anyone apart from themselves might want to use the facilities. Oblivious, perhaps, to the fact that anyone else even existed.

In Australia, we have seen rather more of these perverse creatures, creating filth wherever they seem to go. We wondered whether certain nationalities were worse than others in their disregard for the well-being and feelings of others. To be honest, we rather feared that young British, or even Irish, backpackers might prove to be the worst of all, fuelled by their cultural love of alcohol.

And certainly we found many examples from the British Isles who could definitely be placed in the scummy category. On the other hand, we also came across many Germans who lived up to the 'putting their towels on the deckchairs' stereotype by taking over a camp's amenities and barely allowing anyone else a look-in.

Fearing a national bias on our part, we asked people working at camps in both Brisbane and Sydney which nationalities were the worst offenders in terms of not cleaning up after themselves. Both of them, completely unbidden, named the French as the filthiest.

That got us thinking, because while we have met several wonderful French individuals and couples, there appears to be some kind of 'critical mass' issue. When you get more than, say, four young French backpackers in a confined area, the 'scumminess index' appears not to be quadrupled, but raised by a factor of four. (For those not of a mathematical bent, that is a lot worse - believe me!)

For example, while hanging around in Victoria Street with the car, we noticed that many of the people also selling their vehicles were French. Gradually they and their vehicles coalesced, parking together. When they did so, the noise level rose significantly; so did the density of cigarette smoke; and so did general scummy behaviour such as sitting sprawled over the pavement and even cooking in the open street. If you talked to any of the perpetrators individually, they were fine; as a group they lowered the whole tone to the level of a sub-Saharan or South American shanty town.

However, is this just a matter of national characteristics?

On reflection - and this is a conclusion to which we have come over several months - it's nothing to do with being French, or German, or even British. It's something to do with the sheer number of backpackers trawling up and down the east coast of Australia. We barely found any scummies in the far north or south, and certainly not in the west.

The east coast, however, is where most backpackers congregate. Most are in their twenties and even if university graduates most seem barely capable of wiping their own backsides, let alone washing up properly. When the density of such individuals reaches a certain level, then everyone else suffers from the scummies.

Because of that, I came up with my own name for them: the 'East coast underclass'. In German, that translates rather neatly to 'Ostküste üntermensche' and the best of the online French translators I found came up with 'Côte d'est sous-proletariat'. But perhaps I should have stuck with the phrase voiced by one of the Aussies I talked to: 'Dirty bunch of b******s'. I think that rather sums them up rather well.

Richard