Time really does fly when you’re having fun. This is our last morning in Australia and I’m sat, once more, at the patio table at B and M’s house. B is barbecuing breakfast for the six of us and it smells delicious. K is stowing the wine for our passage back to the Northern Hemisphere. A good opportunity for me to write about the past few days. I have been very slack both with the laptop and the camera over the past few days, which is a shame.

M’s uncle has just reached the ripe young age of seventy years. His family organised a party for him in their home town of Gunnadah, to which my wife and I were kindly invited.

Gunnadah is a fair distance from here. Probably about five hours drive, or thereabouts. N and M wisely suggested that we break up the journey by stopping off in Australia’s famous Hunter Valley, to take in a couple of wineries and (more importantly) their produce!

Three wineries we visited: Macguigan’s, Pepper Tree and Keith Tulloch. At each of these we sampled a wide range of wines, but it was only at the latter of them that we seemed to enjoy every sample as much as the last. Perhaps this was because the tasting was so much more relaxed: we were sitting in comfy chairs in a first floor room with an almost three-hundred-and-sixty degree panorama of the Hunter Valley, with Keith Tulloch among us explaining about how each of the wines were made and discussing the subtle differences between Australian and French wine-making.

We arrived in Gunnadah some hours later, with M’s father. Our hosts had booked us all into a lovely motel, which was conveniently situated a few metres away from the venue for the evening’s event. The birthday celebrations went off without a hitch and some of M’s uncle’s many friends and relations took the microphone during and after a scrumptious meal, to tell stories about the past seventy years. I was very pleased to be there.

The following morning, which was very sunny, we were all invited to an early breakfast at M’s uncle’s house. Over barbecued sausages, bacon, eggs, mushrooms, etc., we chatted with some of the people we had met the night before, who were all keen to hear about where we were from and what we did. They were a very friendly bunch. M’s father insisted that when we return to New South Wales that we gave him some notice and that he would spend two weeks showing us the real Australia! M’s Uncle made me promise that I’d come to his next 70th birthday and that I would bring royalty with me. I’ll be working on that when I get back!

We made our way back to suburban Sydney via Newcastle (driving through Hexham and Stockton!), which is on the coast and has a number of shipyards. It’s a very pretty town with gorgeous long beaches and great hills for flying kites and so forth. Mrs Johns seemed to think that this would be a good place to live. Also on the journey home, we met N’s horse, Cover Girl.

Nearly a day has passed since I started typing these words. We have just had a very early breakfast up above the clouds on Qantas flight twenty-one to Tokyo.

We spent yesterday saying goodbye to the marsupials of Australasia and also to our friends who had made us feel so welcome and so at home on our visit to Australia. We also spent a fair amount of time shopping. I shall be writing more about my favourite purchase at a later point in time. Suffice to say that it is rechargeable, holds 40Gb of music files, is made by a company named after something that grows on trees and was 75% of the retail price at home :-)

As the sun rises in the land of the rising sun, I’m getting excited about the next four days that we’ll be spending there. We land in Tokyo in just over an hour. After we have collected our baggage and didgeridoo, we will be met by my old friend S, who has spent a lot of time arranging things for us to do during our short stay. Today is S’s second wedding anniversary, so we’re especially grateful for him getting up at ludicrous o’clock to pick us up at Narita Airport.

More exciting updates later, I’m sure!