Om swastyastu! ('hello' in Balinese apparantly... I had to look it up on the internet though, as all the people here ever seem to say to us is 'yes, english girl, buy buy, I do cheap price, transport?' regardless of the time of day and whether I'm smiling or pretending to be deaf!). Ah, the joys of leaving Australia and arriving in Asia... Only joking, Bali has actually been awesome so far - largely due to the relentless heat (which we love) and the fact that everything is SO cheap. A 1.5l bottle of water costs us 20p, a large bottle of local beer (and I mean large!) is about 1 pound, an ice cream about 30p, and our ensuite twin hotel room with pool, fan and breakfast included, is just 7 pounds a night. Needless to say Bali is going to be fantastic for budgetting! It's just as well too, as since I last wrote a blog entry I have managed to lose my wallet and my ipod, purely through my own idiocy. I wasn't even mugged! Dammit. I at least wanted to be able to fight for them... not just put them down in places and forget to pick them up, which is what actually happened with both items. I have since found out that losing my ipod was karma's way of sticking its middle finger up at me, as the last thing I wrote in a message to Sarah before it happened was 'I'm so bored of the songs on my ipod I just want to throw it under a bus'. Hmph. Bus not required.

Anyway, we've covered a lot of ground since Airlie Beach, heading to the Whitsunday Islands for a quick three day visit (where it unfortunately rained 90% of the time), and then continuing up the east coast to Cairns via Mission Beach (where it also rained!). After a few days in Cairns we then flew to Alice Springs, in the centre of Australia, and did a nine day tour through the outback up to Darwin, taking in Uluru (otherwise known as Ayres Rock), Kata Tjuta (another large rock formation), camels, crocodiles, cattle stations and some beautiful sunrises and sunsets along the way. It was an exhausting but fantastic trip, and we met some really great people, who'd come to join us from various parts of the globe, too. Gaston, a sixty-something year old French man, particularly sticks out in my mind. He and his wife were doing the tour to celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary and he was constantly getting himself into trouble with his wife by clambering over rocks and jumping over waterfalls. She spent her whole trip yelling 'GASTON!' into the distance and shaking her head in despair, and once she even said to Kirsty in very broken english 'he is a nightmare... he is never tired!' and he overheard and said, 'mais oui, je suis un grande enfant!'. They and two Dutch couples (who we mistakenly thought were related, much to their amusement and the older woman's disgust - she didn't think she was old enough to have a thirty year old son, as we stupidly presumed!) provided great entertainment for the duration of the tour and the long drives between campsites, crocodiles and waterfalls. The highlights of the trip for me have to be camping out under the stars in aussie bedrolls (or 'swags' as they're known) wearing every item of clothing I took with me to keep warm, watching Ayres Rock change colour at sunset whilst drinking fake champage, and getting to ride/bounce up and down on a camel! It was definitely a big change from the party scene on the east coast, and something I'd definitely recommend to anyone visiting Australia who wanted to do something a bit different.

When we finally arrived in Darwin we were exhausted from nine days of 5am starts and looking forward to sleeping in a real bed again. Unfortunately though we'd have been better off in ours swags as once again we managed to get a room with a big ogre of a snoring guy in it! It was like sleeping above an asthmatic pig... Needless to say we couldn't wait to get on a plane to Bali and have a room to ourselves! And now we're here, I don't think we intend on moving from our sunloungers next to the pool for the next week and half... apart from maybe to buy another beer ;)

Hope those of you still reading this are all well! Once we arrive in Singapore on June 4th we'll be on the home straight and back before you know it...