We're on Magnetic Island now, which whilst not being even remotely magnetic, is a nice place. I haven't found it to be the gorgeous island the travel agents would have you led to beleive, but it's nice enough. Sort of place you wouldn't go out your way for, but if you found yourself here you wouldn;t think you'd done too badly. Anyways, ever since we came back from out banger-hire trip we'd been staying at International Backpackers. It was pretty cheap andÂ...

What an awesome day we've had on the reef! We were up painfully early, 5:30am, in order to get over to the jetty in time. Our boat was Ocean Spirit II, which had set us back $100 each for the day (40pounds). It was a big catamaran, and we found a spot on the deck to sunbathe for the hour and a half to get to the reef. The first stop was Oyster Reef, about 40miles offshore. We were doing an introductory scuba dive, which is something Ive been looking forward to ...

We spent our first four days or so in Darwin at the Cavenagh Hostel.  That could be meant literally, as there's so little to do here that we spent most of our time back at the hostel where we could at least get some blessed air-con relief... The weather in Darwin is just horrible.  I don't know why anyone would choose to live here for a number of reasons, but weather is top of my list.  From December to April it rains torrentially every day, and it's ve...

Cairns is such a lovely place. We were so happy with be here. Maybe this was because we came from Darwin so because there's things to actually do here we thought it was great. The town has a big pedestrian area and full of greenery, quite pretty. The Esplanade/Espy (as Aussies are incapable of using 3 syllables) runs along the seafront, and although there isn't really a beach to speak of (who'd go i it if there was? what with crocs, stingers, and so on?!), there ...

We had a mammoth road trip ahead of us as we left Adelaide, over 2200 miles right through the heart of the continent.  We were doing two 'relocations' for rental companies, one from Adelaide to Alice Springs, and the next from Alice up to Darwin.  A relocation is basically when a nationwide rental company has a vehicle in one city, but needs it in another for a customer to rent, and so they offer very cheap rates and sometimes other incentives to get peo...