Well what can I say, it's been nearly 3 months with no updates, we're off to New Zealand soon so I'd better bring you up to speed with our Australia travels first eh?!

We arrived in to Perth at 5.40am but didn't get through customs and out of the airport until 7am, quite nice to see a customs that actually gives a fig about who and what enters their country. Jay and Karrisa meet us and we took the hour drive back to Mandurah.

Mandurah was lovely, right on the coast with an estuary vibrant with dolphins, amazing houses on the river with boats moored up outside, not too shabby for Dee Dee!!

We spent 3 weeks in Mandurah while we looked for our campervans, we enjoyed quite a few cruises on the ocean and the estuary with Jay in his new boat (what a beauty!), walked around the shops marvelling at being back to an almost western way of life after so long in South East Asia. It did take a while to get used to the fact that prices are much more like home so the wallet took a hit.

Itching to get on the road we brought our campervans after long and painful searches, viewing heaps of junk that some I wouldn't want to put a crash test dummyin let alone drive and live in for the next few months!! Steve and I settled for a 4WD, Mitsubishi pop top and Roger with a Mazda E2000. It didn't all go off too well I'm afraid, we booked in for a service before we were to set off, we had to tow Rog's to the garage as it wouldn't start and bunny hopped for a few seconds before conking about completely, excellent!! Both vans had driven fine when we went to see them and both made it the hour drive back to Perth fine, any way our van ended up needing $2000 of work tomake it road worthy, I still feel like crying, we'd paid $5000 the day beforethis was a major b*tch to have pay out for already. Perhaps I should explain a bit.. Cars over here don't have MOT's if you buy a car and wish to register it to another state it goes over the pits (like and MOT) but if like in WA that vehicle keeps changing owners and stays in one particular state there's no compulsory service or work you have to do every year to make it road worthy only if the police pull you over and give you 7 days to put whatever's wrong right. Ok so it appears our little camper had years and years of repairs. Rog's turned out a lot better considering how it went in and was told he had a sound van there. They didn't say anything to us!!

We finally set off and went to the pinnacles, which is basically rock that's been carved by the wind over thousands of years, ok but nothing special in my opinion. Our first night was weird just getting used to where you put things, what you do for dinner, pulling the chairs about to make the bed up.

Forgot to tell you, Rog had a van load of people. Two French girls, Cecile and Patricia travelling up to Broome and Rene our very lovely Welsh boyo who we met in Malaysia. So there's a good lil group we have going on and should make travelling the West coast all the more enjoyable!