Well we were sad to be leaving Coral Bay and also our friend Cat who we stayed with, on her drive way. However we were not sad to be leaving the most annoying person in the world. This was one of Cat's friends who has come from England to live with Cat until she got a job and a place of her own. She had no money and expected meals on the table and a free bed everyday, and she was so rude about it as well, not even grateful, but for cat's sake we didn't cause too much of a fuss. However she definately knew we didn't like her.

After getting about 100k south of coral bay our gear box decided to blow up, somehow we managed to limp in 4th gear, the only gear we had to a very bleak and boring little fruit growing town called Carnarvon. We found a garage that would have a gearbox sent up overnight from Perth at a very reasonable price. Our campsite was a hot and sweaty hours walk into the town to do shopping. Eventually the van was fixed and we were back on the road and heading for Perth. The closer we got the colder it got and we actually had a lot of rain for the first time in months. We stopped at a little place called Monkey Mia which was twinned with Bucks at home. The only reason we were hear was to see some dolphins that have visited the beach everyday for 20 odd years. There were about 15 dolphins ranging from babies to grandmothers. Lucky people were picked out of the massive line of people to hand feed the dolphins a fish from the bucket. I was lucky enough to be one of those people, however the fish were really slimy. We then stayed for the next 2 feeding times so that Kathryn had a chance to feed them, your chances get greater as many people leave after the first feeding. Kathryn nearly got picked but a woman standing next to her wearing a similar striped top was picked. She was a bit disappointed, I felt guilty as going to see them was her idea.

When we got to Perth we found Freemantle was quite an interesting place to be, we found a street that was supposed to be like London, so that was a laugh. As we've got into the whole market thing now we though we would check out the local market but it was lame. Somehow we stumbbled across a much better one later where we also found some real English chocolate that had been shipped over. The chocolate in oz is pretty poor. As we weren't getting what we had hoped for out of Oz and were getting pretty cold at times, we decided to change our tickets and go back to Asia. We could sort some of this out as there was an STA agency in Perth. There were some really cool things to do in Perth but to be honest we just didn't have the time due to the wedding being so near. So we headed for Sydney.

The Outback here was very different, we saw no animals for about 4 days and then saw the most kangaroos ever, and lots of emus. As it got so cold at night we bought a sleeping bag to put over our covers. And we still slept in our cloths, fully dressed. Every morning we woke up and had a hot chocolate to warm up as the van didn't get warm until you had driven for ages.

Somehow we found Nick's house with 2 maps that contradicted each other, called roads different things and all sorts. We got there before they were all back from work so we watched a dvd near their house. We were very glad when they arrived and told us to bring all our stuff in as we had a real bed to stay in. It was really nice to see all my familly in their own home and country, I was a bit gutted when I found out that I wasn't the first Bramall to reach their house. Eric managed to beat me to it. We went into town with Marcus one day and ended up knowing where we were better than him. We saw all the must see sights and had a really nice day. For the wedding we had some clothes tailor made in vienam, and we were nicely surprised that they were still in one peice and fitted well, even the shoes. We went up to the blue mountains for Nikki's wedding, it was on a balcony which had an amazing veiw looking down onto Sydney. Nikki looked stunning and Emma managed to tower above the other bridesmaids even though they were Nikki's friends. The day after the wedding Nick took us futher into the blue mountains and unfortunately it was bad weather for the best view of the journey. Whilst in Sydney we met up with one of Jennifer Yellow Hat's friends (Karen) who had done a similar, but quicker, journey to us, it was fun to compare stories. One of the only trips we could afford to do in Oz was the whale watching just outside Sydney harbour. There was a pod of 5 massive humpback whales migrating to warmer waters and putting on a little display for us. Apparently one of them weighed about 50 tonnes, our guide was getting very excited about this. They didn't breach fully out of the water but they were doing head lunges which was still pretty impressive. As we headed back to the harbour we saw a group of 50-60 dolophins hunting.

As we weren't getting very far with selling the van we were forced to got back to bloody Brisbane as we had lots of people interested in the van there. Someone who had hassled us to go up to show the van to them managed to buy another van as we were 100k away from them. We finally managed to find someone whos gave us an offer of $4000, so we took it, as that would be our spending money in Asia. as soon as we had the money in our hands we booked our tickets to Malaysia and home again for a very cheap price.

We had fun in Oz but we didn't have nearly enough money to do any of the exciting trips out we wanted to do. So we left oz to go on a little months holiday in the sun again.