Sydney, New South Wales.There's not really too much tell from this part of the trip. We had more time here than we had originally planned as we had to give up on the idea of going back to Queensland because of another cyclone, so we had some time to start planning and booking things for the next part of the trip in Asia. It worked out quite well really as this will save us lots of time later on. In between booking flights, trips and accommodation we went into Syd...

After 10 minutes in Alice Springs we had seen more Aborigines than we had in the rest of Australia put together. They seem to sit together in groups on the sides of roads and in car parks swigging from cans of beer all day and having loud arguments. These are apparently not representative of Aboriginal communities as those gathered in the cities are usually those who have been extradited from their communities because of things like alcohol abuse. In Alice we sp...

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...