Firstly, yes the picture is real and you pass these crazily long 'road trains' on the road!! They carry all sorts from cars to produce, to fuel as you see. I'm not sure i'm over the fact over four tanks of fuel on one truck yet. The rest i can cope with.

Anyway, we arrived in Darwin little over two weeks ago now and have done quite a lot in that short time. We stayed in the city of Darwin for 5 nights. Our hosts and hostess, Brendan and Leanne were brill. They even had us camped up in their room because it's too hot out in the lounge, bless them. The first night we were there we went to Shennanigans (the Irish bar where Leanne works) for our tea, i had sausage and mash (mmmm mash potato, i had missed you so) and Dave had chicken supreme. Very nice.

They share their apartment with two Irish lads and on saturday we all went to see the jumping crocs on the Adelaide river which was pretty awesome (i can say awesome now because i'm in Oz). Basically there is a person on the boat with meat on the end of a stick and she teases the croc until it jumps out the water in an attempt to grab the meat. Once it has jumped two or three times she allows it to have the meat so it's not all for nothing. I can't believe how far they jump though! Because they are using their tail to propel upwards you can see the whole of their body right to the back legs! Powerful, and pretty intelligent, animals. The next few days we simply spent chilling at the apartment, in the pool, or around Darwin but there's not a great deal to do. We just enjoyed some chill out time.

We left on our first tour (Kakadu and Litchfield National Parks) on wednesday. Our tour guide was called Rick, he was great, always jolly, always smiling and knew loads about lots of stuff. We spent the first day doing quite a lot of driving down to the south end of Kakadu National Park (the national park is 20,000sq km in size which is around the same size of Wales/half the size of Switzerland!!!!!). We visited a

On monday we waved farewell to our hosts and Darwin and started the long journey from Darwin to Alice Springs. This entailed around 18 hours driving, spread out over the three days. They say it is more of an A-B tour rather than sight-seeing but we saw some weird and wonderful stuff. We stopped at a town (not sure how it can be a town when there are only 10 or 12 people that live there but anyway that's what they say) called Daly Waters. The main attraction is the pub which has hundreds of items of clothing, id cards, hats, flip-flops (or thongs if you're australian) etc that people have left there. They have to pay a dollar for the privilege but all the funds raised are donated to Childrens leukaemia and womens breast cancer so an honourable cause.

Today we have arrived back in Alice Springs after our 3 day Uluru (Ayers Rock) tour.