The morning after arriving in Alice Springs, we were picked up at 5.45am for our three day trip out to Kings Canyon, Kata Tjuta (The Olgas) and Uluru (Ayres Rock). It took until lunch time to get to Kings Canyon and the temperature was 42 degrees centigrade in the shade when we arrived and was about the same for the following two days! Consequently the last thing I felt like doing in the midday heat was climbing 'Heart Attack Hill' to do the Canyon Rim walk. Mart...

We flew into Perth and couldn't find anywhere to stay at all so after searching for a couple of hours we ended up an hour or so out of the city that night. We decided the next day to head north to Cervantes for a couple of nights and explored the Pinnacles Desert in Nambung National Park. It is a bizarre and eerily quiet place with hundreds of sandstone pinnacles scattered throughout the desert landscape. Some are up to 4m tall and look spectacular at sunset. We ...

Tasmania is a lot greener than South Australia and Victoria although the grass is still quite brown in places. We left Melbourne in the hope of escaping the heatwave and it's true it didn't reach 45 degrees in Tasmania like in Adelaide and Melbourne but we still had 38-40 degrees a couple of days. Tasmania is more mountainous than the parts of the mainland that we have seen so far, and there is some water flowing in their rivers, it seemed more similar to New Zea...

South Australia In Adelaide we took some time to wander around the city and then we drove out to the west coast and walked along Henley and Grange beaches. We drove to the summit of Mount Lofty for a view over the city but despite a clear blue sky the view was quite hazy. There had been bush fires near Port Lincoln so possibly this was due to some of the smoke from that. We had lunch with Linda Larsen and Pauline Turner in Adelaide before heading out to the Penf...

New South Wales The weather was immediately hotter on arriving in Australia. After arriving in Sydney we drove out to Katoomba in the Blue Mountains, we stayed in a beautiful house for two nights and from there spent some time in the Blue Mountains National Park. We saw the famous Three Sisters rock formations and took the scenic railway to the valley floor, it descends on a 52 degree incline - the steepest in the world! We also drove out to the Jenolan caves an...