By the time we came to the end of our stay in the rainforest at Cape Tribulation, Eloise and I had exhausted most of the plans we'd had for Australia. Back when we were sitting at a table in a dirty corner of a local pub in north London and planning this trip, my suggestion that we should spend at least a month in Australia had initially been greeted by Eloise with extreme doubt. Having never been to the continent before and not really knowing how much of everything there was to see, her first reaction was to think that Australia would be just like any other holiday destination where you turn up, spend a couple of weeks seeing the sights and then move on. Believe it or not, my suggestion that the one thing I would absolutely love to take her to see while we were in the country was Uluru (or Ayres Rock) was greeted with the response that looking at a big rock wouldn't be very exciting. "So", I was told, "we stand on top of this big rock in the middle of the country and there's nothing to see all around but desert - it doesn't sound very exciting to me." So, being a man who learnt a long time ago the old adage that women are always right even when they're not, I didn't book anything in advance beyond Cape Tribulation and spent most of our Australian budget on making sure that we stayed at only the best resorts in Thailand, Malaysia and northern Queensland. Naturally, as soon as we reached Cairns and started wandering down the street peering in the windows of the numerous backpacker friendly travel agencies along the seafront, Eloise started pointing at photos of Uluru and saying how wonderful it looked, how much more spectacular it was than she had imagined and what a great idea it would be to hop on the first organised tour heading in that direction without any further delay. Luckily, I'm something of a fan of Uluru myself so I wasn't going to turn down the first chance I'd had to go back there since my first tour of Australia way back in 1995.

Before we could pack up our stuff and jump on our westbound tour, however, there was one more thing we both wanted to do while we were so close to the Great Barrier Reef - SCUBA diving. As you'll know if you've been keeping up with my travels, I've done this before - but on that occasion it had been an expensive exercise in which we had been taken out to nearby Green Island where we had been presented with our own private resort for half the day followed by a trip out to a private pontoon which had steps down into the water. This had made the actual dive experience as stress free as possible for those of us to whom a bronze swimming certificate was always something we could only dream of. This time the budget was somewhat tighter, so Eloise and I opted for the more down to earth option of being taken out onto the reef on a boat, mooring up and jumping off the back. To be honest, having already swum about happily under the ocean with no problems at all, albeit hanging on to several other divers and a certified dive master, I didn't really imagine there would be much difference between the expensive option and the cheaper end of the market - after all, putting on a SCUBA divers outfit and getting into the water had got to be the same whichever company took you to the reef, right? Wrong.

Eloise felt a little queasy on the way out, but soon perked up when she realised that looking sick might harm her chances of anybody letting her actually get in the water. I would imagine that telling your dive master you think you might throw up while you're underwater with an oxygen tube clenched between your teeth is probably quite high up on the list of things which will get you banished into a corner and forced to watch everybody else having all the fun. During the journey out to the reef, we were shown how to put on our SCUBA equipment, how to flush water out of the mask (not generally something you want to hear, I'd really rather just have a water-free mask in the first place, thank you very much), and how to tell the difference between the hand signals for "help, I'm drowning" , "Look out, there's a shark behind you" and "this looks like a nice piece of coral, will it try to eat me if I touch it?". As we got closer, one particularly helpful young lady was picked at random and made to kneel on the floor and demonstrate the proper way to suck on a breathing tube while we all stood around looking awkward and wondering if we'd somehow ended up on an 18-30 holiday.

Finally, the boat moored up somewhere out on the reef. Writing this, I'm actually finding myself wondering how you put an anchor down over a fragile eco-system without damaging it, but I'm sure they've thought of that. We all went out onto the worryingly small platform at the back of the boat and changed into the SCUBA outfits provided, which were naturally all just tight enough to squeeze the air out of our bodies. In the usual attempt at humour by our Aussie hosts, most of the boys seemed to end up wearing pink and the girls blue. On command, we all sat down on the edge of the boat with our masks held in position over our mouths and our goggles on our foreheads, looking like a bunch of trainee James Bond wannabes getting ready for a secret underwater mission - then, following the dive master, we all shuffled forward and flopped into the water in as undignified a manner as we could manage. I'm not quite sure how we all managed to stay together without drifting off in different directions at this point - we had been helpfully provided with a rope which we were supposed to grab onto after getting into the water, but I'm sure some of the party were still too busy grappling with the physics involved in believing that the sixty thousand ton tanks of compressed air strapped to their backs would suddenly feel totally weightless in the water rather than pulling them screaming to the very depths of the ocean in a fraction of a second. Nevertheless, any remaining doubts that people might have had about what they'd let themselves in for soon vanished once we were floating about on our piece of rope, and we were soon ducking our heads under the water and following the dive master down to the reef, hand in hand.

As with my previous dive, the group was followed around constantly by a highly curious wrasse which was about twice the size of any of us, it's giant eyes swivelling to watch what we were doing as it sailed gently past every few minutes flapping its fins. This time we didn't come away with a video of our dive, but Eloise had taken the precaution of bringing along an underwater camera she'd bought in Cairns which was basically a perfectly ordinary cardboard disposable camera encased in a large block of plastic. This was a really useful thing to have while we were swimming around snapping away at the multicoloured fish surrounding us, but perhaps didn't look quite so cool later on in the trip when we had our main camera stolen and ended up walking around the cloudforests of Costa Rica taking photographs of monkeys in trees with a block of plastic to which a large blue rubber wrist strap had been attached to stop it floating away. Both Eloise and I came away from the dive with an ear to ear grin permanently sewn to our faces - I can still say without any doubt that diving the Great Barrier Reef is one of those things you really must do before you die. I've always been fascinated by the bright and varied colours of marine fish, so being able to swim among them in crystal clear waters and to have to occasionally get out of the way to let a shoal of peculiar looking bright yellow things with odd looking noses swim by as if you aren't there is really something special. If it weren't for the fact that they have a nasty habit of dropping down dead in home aquariums if you turn your back on them for a couple of minutes or forget to change the water at least fifteen times an hour, I'd probably have a tank full of them at home just to stare at in wonder. But they do, so I don't.

Back on dry land, it was time to pack up what was left of our stuff after we'd crammed 20 Kilograms of it into a box and shipped it back to London a few days before. Well, I say back to London - since it never turned up, your guess is as good as mine where it actually finished its journey. We checked out of the hotel and staggered along the seafront with our suitcases to meet our tour bus which was waiting at the front of the Cairns Transit Centre. The bus was already full of backpackers and other assorted travellers when we arrived, most of them younger than us. Some of them welcomed us on board with friendly smiles and made us feel welcome. Quite a few of the others, frankly, were probably so stoned, drunk or jet-lagged that they wouldn't have noticed if a couple of eight hundred kilogram polar bears had climbed on board and said "good afternoon" to them. Our journey from Cairns to Alice Springs and Uluru would take three days and be over two thousand kilometres in length. I'll just say that again - over two thousand kilometres. You quickly get used to these sort of distances in Australia. It isn't remotely unusual for Australian bus drivers (or "coach captains" as they prefer to be called) to have stickers on the front of their coaches advertising that they are a member of the million mile club - meaning that they've driven a million miles. That's not kilometres, that's miles. We're talking serious distances here, certainly the sort of mileage it would be pretty much impossible for anyone from Britain to imagine driving in a lifetime let alone in a few years as a coach driver. Our trip would be mostly desert all the way, taking in the small towns of Hughenden and Boulia, neither of which I knew anything about. We seemed to be in pleasant company, but even I hadn't been part of a dedicated tour group full of backpackers before, so this was going to be a whole new experience for both of us...

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.