"White shores... and beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise.

Return Of The King


"I am an FBI Agent!!"

Point Break


We've been on the road for a week now, and have arrived in sunny Albany. Looking at the map of Australia we've not done a very good job in terms of distance travelled (maybe an eighth of the way to Melbourne) but in terms of beaches visited and good times had I think we're doing just fine.

At some stage I'll write up the beaches and places we visited and how good or very good they were, but not right now. There are many reasons for this, but the main one is that it would take more time than I have. So this entry is really about the photos, and for those of you back home who want to know what we've been doing, but don't really care what the place where we were doing it was called....

We've been living the good life. The van really does have everything you could possible want (as long as your list of wants is nice and small). We can cook for ourselves, keep things relatively cool, sleep in glorious comfort and drive pretty much wherever we want.

Tom's a surfer, of all things, and so we're stopping at as many beaches as we can to have a surf/swim/sunbathe or just pretending to do one of those things while we watch women go by.

At night we're finding a secluded car park by the beach, cooking dinner and then tucking ourselves up into bed. We go to great lengths to find nice views, and try to go for places where the no camping sign has been removed, probably to be used as wood for a camping fire.

Along the way we've been stopping at National Parks, to go and investigate waterfalls and big trees, and then going back to the beach or up some cliffs to nearly get blown to our deaths by the wind but not quite.

We have stood at the most South-Westerly tip of Australia, at the point where the Indian Ocean and the Southern Ocean meet. And while we were there we had a debate about whether or not that was the lighthouse out of "Round The Twist"... after some texting to Australian friends it turns out it wasn't..... Oh well.

We've had our Lola attacked by a hundred mosquitos, and driven through a swarm of Locusts. We've watched beautiful sunsets and seem more stars in the sky at night than there has any need to actually be. We've climbed up to the top of massive sand dunes and then ran down again as fast as we could.

We're not drinking at the moment as we're all doing this journey on the cheap (and Lola can be quite demanding when it comes to things like petrol), so at night after dark it's pretty much early to bed and early to rise. Not a practise I am at all familiar with but it sems to be quite good fun.

I think the most noteworthy thing so far is this - Australia is beautiful. I mean really, remarkably beautiful. True, there are a few to many things hiding in the bushes that want to kill me. And also true, the first wild Kangeroo we saw was roadkill at the side of the road. But still.