Well, we are heading back to the land of koalas and kangaroos to do a bit more exploring. About 5,000 miles around the east coast.

Just to give you a feel of the place here's a bit of trivia. Australia is the smallest continent in the world and the 6th largest country.

It has a population of about 24 million in a country 31 times bigger than the UK, which has population of around 63 million. Or put another way the UK has 248.25 persons per square kilometre compared with only 2.66 persons in Australia. Gosh we are packed in!

Australia has more than 40 million kangaroos (Wouldn’t have like to be the person that did that count) and about 140 million sheep.

It has the longest fence and longest straight road in the world. The fence, called the 'Dingo Fence’ is 5,531 kilometres long and the road is 148 kilometres long!

Enough of that for now. We had a reasonable flight with a 2 hour stop at Dubai for refueling. Melbourne customs was a little disappointing. I had watched a few afternoon ‘Nothing to Declare’ TV programmes showing persons trying to get a variety of foods, drugs, weapons etc. into Australia so I was prepared. It seemed that they were forgiving if you declared items on the form before you reached the customs desk. So I dutifully ticked the box saying I had food and medicine. Now on the TV people were having to unpack their bags and show the said declared items. Again, I was prepared, with my items carefully packed together in one case in a plastic bag. After all this effort I was a little put out when the officer read my declaration, asked what I had and waived me straight through.

The apartment we are staying at, for three nights before we pick up the campervan, is in the centre of china town in a great location close to the city centre. We unpacked, did some shopping and sat down to eat. I went to get my ‘declared’ bottle of Flaxseeed oil (carefully packed and carried from home) out of the fridge and watched it slip out of the door onto the tiled floor. A crack and the floor had a liberal coating of oil, which took quite a while to clear up with the limited supply of toilet roll provided. Oh well.

The next day we headed out to- you’ve guessed-buy some flaxseed oil. After this we came across an old shot tower (Coop’s), preserved and protected within a glass conical roof. The tower was built in 1888 and is 50 metres high. Shot towers were designed for the production of lead shot balls produced by the freefall of molten lead. The liquid lead forms tiny spherical balls by surface tension as it passes through a copper sieve. The balls then cool and partly solidify as they fall down the tower and finally land in water. The higher the tower the bigger balls you can make.

The process was invented by William Watts of good old UK, and patented in 1782. The same year he extended his house in Bristol to build the first shot tower. The oldest standing shot tower in the UK (and possibly the world) is Chester Shot Tower, in Boughton Chester, built in 1799. The tower still retains a spiral staircase and melting pots.

After this we took a river cruise along the Yarra river under some low bridges. One only cleared the boat by about 150 mm. Don’t believe me look at the photo. The river apparently has a tidal range of 2.2 metres and at high tide several bridges are seriously low as we found out.

That night the jet lag was bad. At 9.00 we couldn’t stay awake but at 12.20 we woke hungry and had toast and marmalade and read for an hour. After that we slept little till 9.00 when we slept till 12.30. Oops.

The remainder of the day was spent walking around the city to try and tire ourselves out. Tomorrow we pick the campervan up and Peter has a lot of driving to do.