"Bloody hell Walshy", I proclaimed whilst nearly spitting out my beer...."it's f-in Bulmer!"

Yes we'd been travelling and camping for nearly 2 weeks up and back down the seriously impressive & unbelievably hot west coast of Oz and had barely seen a tv within this time. Yet as I'd sat down in our accommodation back in Perth for the 1st time and switched on the tv, the English programme of 'The Chase' was screening. I was literally just about to have a flick through the channels when all of a sudden one of Walshy's bezzie mates Kate Bulmer was there staring at me! We'd obviously known that Bulmer had been on 'The Chase' ages ago now but to say there she was on the other side of the world on the tv at that very moment seemed unbelievably surreal and coincidental!

I was then already in a state of 'how mad is that when you think about it - we're in Australia, there's a million episodes of 'The Chase', we haven't watched tv for ages.....yet there's Bulmer right in front of us, when I then got to meet one of our new flat mates. A German called Marcus who Stace had met first when he walked up the stairs in gold pants and golden boots. When Stace said to me "guess what he does for a living?", I motioned to Ze German and said "go on"....."a zstatue" came the reply, "a what sorry mate?", "a living statue of Elvis Presley!" One thing you're guaranteed whilst travelling is that you will no doubt meet some characters along the way and here we would be living with apparently the only living statue on the Western Coast of Oz. Something had to be amiss...it was he was definitely slightly strange!

"Put the air con on Giz" - "but the car temp sez it's only 43 degrees" - "GET the air con on!!" Yes the last few weeks had been hot hot hot after we had rang in the new year, where else but the Perth casino with two of the valley ex pats of Ry Rispin and his bird Becky. The notion of flash packing couldn't have been anymore apparent as we'd stayed at the Hilton Perth for new year, quickly followed by sleeping in a tent up the coast. However after our first night under the stars where I'd ended up with a bad back and Stace had finished up sleeping in the car, we knew we'd have to get some sort of mattress if we were going to carry on doing a 'Bear Grylls'.

However, the early nights and even earlier mornings would all prove to be worth it for the breathtaking scenery that is the West Coast of Oz. We'd been fortunate enough to have seen a number of amazing sites thus far yet the West Coast would also not let us down in this respect. Highlights other than the sunrises and sunsets included 'the pinnacles' (an eerie experience of thousands of stone formations in the desert), 'the pink lake', (yes a lake that due to some salts or whatnot makes the water actually pink), the 'little lagoon', the Kalbarri national park and the main highlight being Monkey Mia (a place where wild dolphins come into the shore every morning for a snack and where only a few tourists are picked out randomly to help feed them, Stacey being 1 of the lucky ones with her corked Ozzie hat helping her to stand out in the crowd - went without saying that I reminded her how good a Christmas present it was & that she was absolutely buzzin!). We'd even ran into a dolphin the night before whilst I was having a swim and Stace had spotted the fin only 20 or so metres away, what a place we had arrived at.

Throw in a visit to a local porn shop, yes porn shop, because on the outside it said 'exchanges books and DVDs' and I was trying to swop my Ferguson autobiography (we didn't think anything of the blacked out door and realised after that it said swingers on the windows - we waltzed in and the guy behind the counter just laughed followed by us laughing hysterically outside coz the 80 year old Fred had just walked in - we knew this as the porn clerk greeted him by name!) Alas, mix in a wonderful home cooked thai curry at my mums friends Annie & Rons (thanks Annie) and a few day trips to places like the obligatory zoo, the very quirky port town of Fremantle and Cottesloe and Scarborough beaches; the latter being where we would have a full blown shark scare as the siren rang out and people were told to get out of the water due to a 2 & a half metre shark having been spotted in the local area! "Thought you were going for a swim Giz?" "Errr not today", I replied: And our 2 and a half month Ozzie adventure would come to an end but not before 1 last BBQ and night out with the Rispin brothers that also included a highly sweaty & competitive 3 match a piece afternoon of table tennis with Jord Rispin (honestly it was like watching Chun Win Wong vs Forrest Gump) and we'd soon be on the plane back to South East Asia for the next 3 months.

However, you'd think we'd have a wedding to talk about but all Stacey has on her mind are the 4 quid thai massages!!