We eventually left Mildura with an apparently fully-functioning car shortly after noon. The staff at the motel were all very good and understanding, which was very nice indeed.

Our first stop of the day was at Berri to investigate The Big Orange that we’d read so much about in our new book. Imagine, dear reader, the disappointment when we arrived to discover a huge ‘Closed’ sign and a padlock on the gate.

Shortly after the first stop was a town called Barmera (in South Australia, don’t forget to put those watches back half-an-hour!) where we were to fill up and change drivers. We filled up, returned to the car and were absolutely aghast to see green coolant leaking all over the forecourt. I popped the bonnet to see coolant leaking out of the pipe that had been the cause of our delay this morning and felt absolutely furious. There was nothing I could do about it, we were 200km away from the garage by now. We moved the car away from the petrol pumps (not that the service station was particularly busy) and a kind passer-by stopped to help. He recommended a local mechanic, who appeared in a few minutes and identified the problem as the housing to the replaced thermostat: there was no way that the pipe could form a seal with this aged piece of metal, as was proved when the jubilee clip was tightened and the radiator was topped up with rainwater… it came straight out at the thermostat housing! We limped the poor old Ford Laser back to his workshop and the mechanic set off on a 20km journey to get a replacement housing and a new pipe. He said we’d be on the road within an hour. We used the time to investigate Barmera. Unfortunately it was far too hot in the sun to walk around the beautiful lake so we stopped into a pub for a couple of colas and a few games of pool. We considered booking into the local YHA but decided that we’d await the outcome of the mechanic’s work. He was delayed in traffic. There are not many passing places on the section of the Sturt Highway as we had discovered earlier in the day. Once he was back, though, he had the whole unit reassembled in no time and adjusted the timing, so everything was running like clockwork. It was annoying to have to pay for the same job to be done twice in one day, but c’est la vie, I suppose.

On the road again! We drove through Morgan to Burra (listening to Deep Purple on the iPod: what great music to drive to), where we have stopped in the hotel for the night. The hotel is cheap and cheerful (and the bar was closed when we went to investigate about half-past-nine), but the food here is wonderful. We recommend it heartily!

The cooling system in the car now appears watertight and we are confident of making it up to Alice Springs without any further problems. We are booked into The Mud Hut Motel in Coober Pedy for tomorrow night, which means an early start in the morning to catch up on the kilometres we should have covered today. We’re both looking forward to seeing this motel, though, particularly as we saw one of their 4x4s at a number of service stations (sorry Aussies, ‘Servos’) along the Nullarbor. From there, we’re off to see the biggest thing yet…

It is not often that I write for this blog while I am sitting outside, but this morning is one such occasion. The sun is reflecting off the motel’s swimming pool, the bright blue sky is dotted with little fluffy clouds, K’s dozing in bed (this motel has great black-out curtains) and I’m sitting a table in my shorts and t-shirt tapping merrily on my laptop.

Having verified the water levels in The Beast and set off bright and early, the journey from Hay to Mildura was an easy one. Driving across the Hay Plain was a lot easier on this stretch as the outside temperature seemed to be about ten degrees lower than it was on the other side of Hay the previous day. We made three stops along the way: one for fuel and a pilot change, another to get a snap of the Big Wine Cask at the Stanley Winery and another on the short journey from the Winery to Mildura as we spotted a Big Pharaoh at the side of the road.

I read in one of our guidebooks that Mildura is a Victorian town and was therefore disappointed to see that the locals were not entering into the spirit of things and strolling the streets in period attire. Perhaps it’s just because the schools re-opened their doors after the long summer break? In actual fact, being in Victoria means that we have now been to four of the six Australia States (just Tasmania and Queensland to go). All things being well, we should also have been to both Australian territories, too. I think that’s pretty good for a couple of Brits who’ve only been in the country since Christmastime!

We booked into The Commodore Motel around lunchtime and dropped the car off at a local garage. The modification that the NMRA man made to the thermostat on Sunday evening was not intended to be a panacea, but more a quick-fix. When I pick up the car this morning, it should have at least a new thermostat and a new radiator cap and we should be good to head north with a car that is capable of cooling both its engine and its passengers. We’ve heard that the temperature in the centre of the country is reaching fifty degrees at the moment, so we’re going to want a car that cools.

Commodore fans will be disappointed to learn that I’m yet to spot a PET or a Vic-20 anywhere. Not even a once ubiquitous Commodore 64 is to be seen on the premises. A Holden Commodore has just pulled up into the car park, if that helps?

For my computer fix, we went to a coffee shop for lunch where they had lots of PCs all hooked up to the wondrous Internet. This enabled me to upload the previous three blog entries for your delight and delectation.

We spent some time yesterday afternoon wandering alongside the Murray River, admiring the paddle-steamers. And swatting flies. On the way back towards the motel, we found some gas-powered barbecues in the local park. Bingo! Whilst I shall always prefer a charcoal grill, I love the idea that local councils, Lions Clubs and Rotary Clubs provide permanent barbecues in parks and so on for the public to use. we have seen many of these on our travels, but this was our first opportunity to put one to good use. As such, yesterday evening, armed with a full coolbag, cooking utensils and a bottle of wine from The Barossa Valley, we set off for the park.

The park was surprisingly busy (it had been empty that afternoon), but one of the three barbecues was still available, so we threw some prawns and some other seafood on the barbecue and we were good to go! Eating dinner at a table in a park is something that I think I could get quite used to.

As the evening drew in, we packed our stuff and headed back to the motel for a couple of episodes of 24. It is getting even better as the series goes on.

*Update*

I turned up at the garage this morning to pick up the car. The bonnet was up, but there was nobody visibly working on it. The guy in the office told me that they were just putting the radiator and the thermostat back together and that it would be ready within the hour. Since we had to be out of the motel room in a little over an hour, I thought it prudent to mention this to the receptionist at the motel, expecting it to take a little over an hour to get the car back and loaded up. We spent the next hour at the local shopping arcade and the phone rang ten minutes after we were due to check-out. The car’s not ready. They found a leaky pipe after fitting the thermostat and so are now replacing that. We’ve asked to stay in the motel room for another hour, which the staff were fine with, thankfully. As each minute ticks by, though, I’m thinking that we’ll be spending another night in Mildura. Not that Mildura isn’t a very nice place, but we have plans, you know?

Where the Hell is HAY?

This is what is says on the postcard that K picked up from the caravan park in Hay, this evening. Hay is, I can inform you, where we’re staying for tonight, a little under 300km short of our intended destination. The town is situated approximately half-way between the cities of Sydney and Adelaide. On the upside, this gives us another town to explore and the time to write yet another blog entry! Always look on the bright side of life and all that!

As I mentioned this morning, Big Things were on the menu for today. At lunchtime, we stopped of at Narrandera. It is advertised that "The World’s Largest Playable Guitar" is housed in Narrandera. We spent some time driving up and down the streets and eventually parked up at the Tourist Information office… just as they closed for the day.

To our delight, the lady who had locked up the shop opened the doors and when we told her why we were in town, she invited us in. Propped up against the back wall of the Narrandera Visitors’ Information Centre was a 582cm long, 202cm high acoustic guitar! Having fingered the opening riff to Smoke on the Water on the fretboard and had my photo taken with the aforementioned gargantuan musical instrument, we made for the exit.

We thanked the kind lady who had admitted us to the building after hours and told her of our travels. She mentioned the Big Things book that I had seen advertised in the window. They had some copies in stock and so now I am armed with David Clark’s indispensable guide to Australia’s amazing roadside attractions.

From Narrandera, we set out in the afternoon heat for Mildura. The Hay Plains were possibly harder work than the Eyre Highway. Thankfully we were stocked up on water. We stopped for a planned fuel stop and driver change (we tend to only let the tank get down as far as half-full before refuelling and this makes for a good time to change divers). As I hopped back into the car I noticed an ominous gurgling sound. Outside the car I witnessed our bright green coolant colouring the tarmac of the forecourt. And didn’t swear once.

The nice man from the NMRA arrived promptly after a telephone call and suggested that we drove to his garage to pressure-test the radiator. This was a short drive (thankfully, as the coolant bottle had completely emptied itself inside ten minutes in the forty-degree heat) and he soon established that the radiator system was watertight, which was a relief. He made a minor technical adjustment to the thermostat that controls the amount of coolant that gets into the engine block. After a test drive along the highway with a full coolant bottle, he confirmed that the car was roadworthy once more.

It being too late to head off for Mildura, we have parked ourselves at the caravan park next to his garage, where we will spend tonight. An early night is predicted, so that we can get as many kilometres behind us in the morning before it gets too hot. By contrast to what our friends in Perth were telling us, it’s been one of the hottest summers in Hay for years!

On the news, we have hear that Europe is experiencing one of the coldest winters for years. I hope you are all wrapped up warm at home. If you think it is too cold, just bear in mind how much harder it is to sleep when it is too hot. The grass is always greener, my friends!

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged about what we’ve actually been up to, so I thought I’d take the opportunity as K is driving along Hume Highway to catch up and try to get back into the habit of blogging more frequently. As I was saying to my friend S in Sydney the other evening, I like having a place to share my thoughts and experiences with friends and family (and, heck, anyone who wants to read it). Some people I know would rather send such information by email, but that assumes that all of the recipients actually want to read it. I don’t wish to be so assuming, and so leave the onus with you guys to visit this page (or subscribe to one of its feeds, which is less of a burden), that way you can pick up the story where and when you like (if at all). The blog, of course, also serves as a diary, so I can look back and see what I’ve been up to. If I recall correctly, my memory used to be much better than it is now.

I digress. I want to talk about our time in Canberra, which is where we have been since Friday evening, when we arrived from M’s father’s farm in Orange.

Canberra, for those who don’t know, is in ACT. If last night and the night before are anything to go by, ACT stands for Australia’s Centre of Thunderstorms. We’ve seen some fairly spectacular lightning in our time in Australia’s Capital Territory. I’m sure there are plenty of websites out there which will provide you with the history of how Canberra and the ACT were created in the early part of the twentieth century to move the Federal Capital from Melbourne, so I see no point in getting it wrong here! To me, the City is much like the New Towns back in the UK. No matter how hard they try, architecturally-designed cities always seem to fall short when it comes to providing the character and soul that the older cities of this planet are abundant in. Canberra, sadly, is not the exception.

That’s not to say that there’s nothing to do in Canberra. It is, after all, the Capital City of Australia. It houses parliament, universities and the national film and sound archives. There is also plenty of shopping to be done in the centre, if that’s what you’re after.

Our first evening did not get off to the best of starts. Having found the budget hotel that we had reserved for us at the Tourist Information Centre, we spent the best part of an hour trying to find a car park where we could leave The Beast for the weekend without having to pay by the hour. Eventually we struck gold on London Circuit where we found a car park that was free for the whole weekend (and not too far from the hotel).

Yesterday we walked to Capital Hill, perhaps not by the most direct route, despite making a bee-line for the huge flag flying from the roof of Parliament House. It seems that Canberra isn’t the most pedestrian-friendly city and we ran out of footpath at the base of Capital Hill, to be confronted with more lanes of traffic than we would have hoped for. Parliament House itself was an interesting excursion. It’s free to enter and free tours start every thirty minutes. We were taken into the House of Representatives and The Senate. Every one of the vast rooms that we were taken into was impressive. Unlike the city, itself, the effort that had been spent on creating Parliament House and the amount of thought that had gone into the details has really paid off. I would say that it’s worth visiting Canberra just to experience Parliament House. To get back to the Civic Centre just walk down Capital Hill towards the old Parliament building (you’d think they’d get it right first time, wouldn’t you?) and take a left to get you back to the bridge.

We spent much of the afternoon at ScreenSound Australia watching archive footage from the past 110 years, including scenes from Neighbours, Home and Away and Skippy. Again, this was a free visit, but I would have happily paid to sit in their dark, air-conditioned rooms watching films.

We chose a pizza-place for dinner last night, which claimed to have its own brewery. However, each time I asked for one of their own beers, they brought me a different bottled beer from further afield. Their pizza wasn’t much cop, either, so I wouldn’t recommend visiting it.

Today, we’re heading West again to Mildura. We’ve seen a small Big Thing en route so far and there’ promise of more. Perhaps I’ll post a picture of the Big Dog on the Tuckerbox with these words.

Note: While typing this, we have passed a sign advertising "fixourbloodyroads.com", which I shall check out when I get online. I have put this paragraph in here to remind me!

"We are about to re-enter the Zone of Unpredictable Connectivity"

…wrote Plurp, which pretty much sums up what we are doing today.

Today we leave Sydney for Orange, where we’ll celebrate Australia Day, before continuing on our journey and our quest for Big Things.

Doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun, exploring cities, visiting friends and family, barbecuing in a pub and all that jazz?

We hope not to be In The Zone for quite as long as Plurp has been. Keep your RSS Reader, tuned, folks.

We’re in Sydney!

In the past few days we’ve covered a fair amount of kilometres, avoided a couple of hopping marsupials and stayed in a couple of nice motel rooms. Now we’re staying in Hornsby with our friends M and N and baby A. It’s really good to see them again: last time we met was over in Horsham and N had only recently discovered that she was pregnant, now they have a lovely little girl. It’s fun playing with little A. It’s also going to be nice to be in one place for a few days, I can tell you!

The trip from Port Augusta has been pretty uneventful, to be honest with you. We stopped off in Wilcania for the first night, and in Bathurst the second night. From Bathurst, the journey to Hornsby was to be an easy one, so we made time to stop off and see some Big Things, drive around a motor racing circuit and take in some scenic views.

Mount Panorama in Bathurst is a public road, but is home to a 1000km race every October. We took The (fully laden) Beast around the circuit at 60km/h, which enabled K to take some snaps of the beautiful views as we went around, but also enabled me to keep my driving licence. I shall have to pay a visit to Bathurst next time the V8 Supercars are exercising their muscles around the track as it looks like one heck of a race circuit!

We saw The Big Gold Panner on the outskirts of Bathurst. We didn’t get out of the car to photograph him as we were on the wrong side of a busy road. By the time we got to The Big Trout in Oberon the rain had started to fall. Rain, we have learned, will fall every time I put shorts on and cover my legs in factor

1. Our scenic route to The Blue Mountains was not as scenic as it may have been. Visibility was practically nil as we entered the clouds. This is where I discovered that The Beast is not fitted with fog lights! We stopped off briefly in Bilpin to snap The Big Fruit Bowl, again staying in the dry car. But we made it to our destination with no dramas. I did miss the car I had in the UK, though. The roads in the Blue Mountains would have been a lot more fun with bigger wheels and more power to pull us up the steep inclines.

That’s about all I have for you. Later on I shall borrow some of M’s bandwidth and upload a stack of photographs for you to marvel at. That should keep you busy!

A few moments ago I received a text message from my cousin who’s recently landed in Sydney from Dublin. I suspect that this will lead to us having a few beers in the City later on this week. I’m looking forward to that.

Ceduna, it transpires, is the home of The Big Oyster! Our Big Things average is going through the roof, I tell you!

A Big Oyster, which was not all that big to be honest with you was not all that huge, was not enough to keep us in Ceduna, though and we were soon in the belly of The Beast and heading for the Orient once more.

It appeared that we’d stumbled unwittingly into The Lake District as the heavens opened and we were in the middle of a massive downpour. And then for a while, every town we passed seemed to be the same as the last with a bowling / golf club, a pub and a massive grain store.

Kimba marks the half-way point between the East and West coasts of this giant continent. We acknowledged this by parking outside the snappily-titled Half Way Across Australia Gift Shop and taking a photograph of the great Galah that stands in their car park.

Eager to make it more than half-way to our destination, we set off at the national speed limit, continuing due East. Our enthusiasm was overwhelmed only by a lack of petrol as we approached Iron Knob. The sign outside the petrol station declaring "Come in, we are open" was betrayed by the locked doors and the closed shutters. Thankfully, there were ten litres of petrol in a handy red can in the boot of The Beast. This was more than enough to get us to our planned stop.

Port Augusta is Australia’s crossroads. To the North lie Alice Springs and Uluru, to the East, Sydney. South is Adelaide and if you want to know what lies to the West, then I suggest you go back and read the previous ten blog entries! Tonight K and I shall lie in Port Augusta, having found that the hostel we had planned on staying was no longer there and the hotel we had as a backup was closed. We have found a nice room above a pub, though for not-too-many dollars. Sadly, this does not seem to include WiFi.

Food will be served shortly, so I shall wrap up here by announcing that we have changed our planned route around Australia and that we are now going to continue to the East Coast. It seems a fair number of our friends and family are going to be in Sydney towards the end of this month and it would be a shame to miss them all by arriving there after they have left. I’m looking forward to seeing Sydney again and our friends that live there. More news as it happens.

Predictably, I am still typing this offline. I’m going to enjoy having broadband when we eventually settle, I tell you!

Norseman, as I mentioned earlier was our last stop before we hit the Eyre Highway. In fact, our stop in Norseman was far shorter than we anticipated. There was nothing to do there other than stock up on food, drink and petroleum and then follow the sign that ran, "Adelaide - 1986km". This is pretty much what we did, K taking on the first leg of the long, long road.

Setting off, as we did, at lunchtime limited the distance that we could cover in a day. Driving after twilight is not recommended as that’s when the marsupials tend to go off in search of food and they don’t learn their Green Cross Code at school. The sides of the Highway 1 are littered with kangaroo cadavers. I can only imagine how the cars looked after their impact. The birds, though, seem to do quite well out of this long stretch of road: it has a plentiful supply of fresh food for them!

Driving across the Nullarbor was actually nowhere near as daunting as I imagined it might be. It may have been more daunting if I were to cycle across like one Swiss nutter (I assume he was Swiss – not because all of the Swiss people I have met are nutters but because he was flying the Swiss flag from his bicycle.) who we passed along the way. You do have to keep your eyes and ears open all the time, though, particularly when a roadsign (and what looks like a zebra crossing) announces that you are actually driving along an emergency runway for the Royal Flying Doctor Service. The other advantage to watching what’s going on around you (in addition to the long road ahead) is that you get to see (live) dingos, gallahs and kangaroos.

Cocklebiddy was our retreat for the night. This came at the end of a ninety-mile stretch of road without a single bend! Their budget room was the price of a bottle of white wine cheaper than their standard motel room. We took the budget room and the bottle of Chardonnay went down very nicely with dinner, thankyouverymuch. Actually dinner was very nice indeed, it was the first meal that we’ve had out recently that came with boiled potatoes. It seems that most places expect that if you are driving then you must want ‘…and chips’. The room was functional, with tasteful wooden veneer. The towels that were provided looked as if they were new when the motel was built, but still, I can’t imagine anyone spending more than 12 hours in Cocklebiddy (apart from the staff). I was amazed that for somewhere so remote the night was so loud and so bright. The diesel generator behind the motel and the constant flood-lighting prevented me from getting too much sleep and soon after sunrise I was ready to hit the road. Of course sunrise arrives in Cocklebiddy three-quarters of an hour earlier than in the rest of Western Australia as they are in their own bizarre timezone: Central Western Time.

Today we drove and we drove. Stopping just for fuel and to change drivers. We caught two pictures of Big Things (a kangaroo and a whale) sadly, we were going too quickly to catch a photo of The Big Boomerang (we shall have to go back sometime!). We also stopped to take our first views of The Great Australian Bight as we reached it. On average we switched drivers about every 200km, which works really well. The time in the passenger seat is far more relaxed than normal as very little navigation is needed on such a long highway, just right for dozing sufficiently to get a crick in your neck!

The last hour or so on the highway was hard work. The temperature soared as the clouds that protected us for most of the journey disappeared. While The Beast is equipped with air conditioning, I was conscious of the position of the needle on the temperature gauge on the dashboard and aimed to give the engine the best chance of keeping cool. Thankfully, the fruit fly checkpoint wasn’t far away at this point and having assured the nice man that we were not bring any of that nasty Western fruit into his fruit-fly-free state, we stopped in Ceduna for the evening.

Pinky’s Point provided a scenic venue for a picnic while we decided where to stop for the night. We chose a caravan park very close to the centre of town and also to the beach. Conveniently they have a vacancy for the evening and we’re currently enjoying sitting in our air-conditioned cabin.

Just one final point before I head off to prepare a nice cool salad for tea: when the sign at the state border tells you to wind your watch forward by 45 minutes, check first to see if the state you are entering has Daylight Savings Time, this will prevent any embarrassment as you try to enter a shop as it’s closing and declaring that it doesn’t shut for another hour. We are now, incidentally 10.5 hours ahead of British Summer Time (in case you were thinking of calling)!

The reader joins us, on James Dane’s birthday, in Kondinin, which I believe is Aboriginal for the posterior of nowhere!

To pick up the story from where we left off… …we did climb a big tree on Sunday. Or at least, K did. I got 25m up and decided that I’d had enough. I don’t consider myself to be afraid of heights, but climbing pegs around the outside of 75m tree was enough to make me get a bit dry in the mouth and a bit wobbly in the legs. The views from 25m were pretty spectacular. K kindly brought my camera to the very top of The Bicentennial Tree and too some shots from there. They’re pretty impressive, too. Again, once I get a decent Internet connection, you will be able to share in these photographs. A decent Internet connection is now a necessity before the end of the month as I’m informed that Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs require that I file a tax return for 2004/05 by the end of January. Deep joy!

Back to the trees… We left Pemberton bright and early on Monday morning and headed off for some more tall trees. The Treetop Walk in The Valley of the Giants was Mrs J’s must-see in West-urn Australia and it was conveniently situated on our route from Pemberton to Albany. On this occasion, I managed the entire 600m bridged walkway, which ascends to 40m above the ground without any problems, even when the walkway started swaying considerably! The views were spectacular!

Even more interesting than The Treetop Walk was the (free) Empire walk, through the various gum trees. It’s fantastic the way these indigenous trees recover from forest fires.

We stopped off en route to Albany at Denmark’s Ocean Beach for a lunchtime picnic and to watch the young surfers take lessons. We both quite fancied joining in, actually. Once back on the road we made good time down to Albany, making it to the YHA before their office opened for the evening. We paid a visit to The Old Gaol, but to be honest once you’ve seen one old colonial prison, you’ve pretty much seen them all.

Rocks seem to be the big thing at the moment. Albany houses a rock at the side of the road, which locals claim looks like a dog. We wandered up to take a look at it, and, with the help of the signs of a couple of local businesses that take their name from Dog Rock and a helpfully painted-on dog collar, we could make out why they name the rock Dog Rock, but if you look at it form the other side, it looks more like a bottlenose dolphin. Far more interesting, if you ask me (and even if you don’t: it’s my blog), were the pink parrots flying overhead. The birds here are amazing, so brightly coloured.

Today’s activities have been largely rock-related, too. We’ve driven about 500 kilometres (paj’s rule of thumb for converting kilometres to miles, stick a zero on the end and half four times {500, 5000, 2500, 1250, 625, 313}, simple!) inland to see the phenomenom that is Wave Rock. Again, you’ll have to wait to see the snaps. Nearby is the Hippo’s Yawn, which is another huge rock that if you squint sideways in the right light after the correct amount of alcohol, you’ll see looks astoundingly akin to a hippopotamus yawing. Really.

Bizarrely, having driven so far, I’m sure that today we’ve seen more horses made of tin than we have seen cars! The Tin Horse Highway stretches for 20km {20, 200, 100, 50, 25, 12.5} from East to West Kulin. This proved a useful source of amusement on the long stretch from Wagin, The Home of The Big Ram. The Big Ram being our fourth Big Thing, keeping our average above one per week.

We stopped driving before twilight as that’s when the kangaroos start foraging and we didn’t want to be hitting one of those with The Beast. Kondinin presented itself as a friendly enough town with a couple of motels. The one we’ve chosen to stop at has a bar next-door, which is dead handy. This is a small town (population _c._250) and just to prove what a small world it is, the barmaid went to the same school as a guy I used to work with!

I have a few moments to myself, so I thought I’d pop another blog entry onto my camera’s Memory Stick to be uploaded next time I am online. I also have a load of photographs to share with you, but slow Internet connections with an hourly rate aren’t ideal for uploading them. For the time being you shall have to make do with a few hundred words instead of the pictures, for which I can only apologise.

We’re currently in Pemberton, staying in a wooden-built Villa attached to the YHA backpackers’ hostel. We’ve pretty much had the villa to ourselves since we arrived yesterday afternoon, which is nice.

Last time I updated the blog we were considering a trip to the Fudge Factory in Margaret River. This was indeed our first stop of the day. We didn’t spend long there, though, as there was little more to see than lots of sugary merchandise.

K suggested a visit to The Giants Cave (there was no apostrophe on the sign, so I have no idea if this was a cave of one or many giants, sorry). This sounded like a far better idea than stuffing ourselves full of chocolate, fudge, caramel and milkshakes, so off we went.

Ten dollars gets you a helmet, a big torch and a few spoken words from the guide on the cave. After that, you’re pretty much on your own with a huge, unlit underground cave. As we decended the steps towards the mouth of the cave, we could feel the temperature dropping considerably. I cannot recall what the outside temperature was on Friday (I think it was Friday, the days are all merging into one, now), but it has been in the thirties most days since we landed in Western Australia. The temperature in the cave was a pleasant 17 degrees celcius with 90% humidity. There were a lot of steps down into the main cave and with the torches off it was pitch black. Having established how dark it would be with no torchlight, we kept the bulbs burning brightly until we reached the far end and exit of the cave. There was a huge, sand-floored ‘ballroom’, where the roof was many metres above our heads. I forget now if that was before or after the ladder climbs. I tried with varying degrees of success to take photographs in the dark of the roots of the trees above us as well as the many calcium-based structures that had formed in the cave, I shall put them on Flickr sometime for you to criticise.

We opted then to head to Australia’s most South-Westerly point for a spot of lunch. Augusta marks the point where the Indian Ocean meets the Southern Ocean and has the third-tallest lighthouse in Australia. It also has a calcified water-wheel and quite a few flies (have I mentioned the flies before?). Other than that, Augusta is a pretty unremarkable town.

Back in Margaret River we made the most of the hostel’s outdoor swimming pool, which was just the ticket after spending a lot of the day in The Beast. We had a barbecue by the pool that evening and enjoyed a bottle of Chardonnay that we’d picked up Edward’s winery.

The journey from Margaret River to Pemberton was a hot one. I shall have to look out for a thermometer as The Beast doesn’t have one built in. I think that yesterday was probably the hottest day since we landed. I’m glad that we have the iPod and relevant adaptors with us, as there are vast stretches of road where there is no radio reception. The GSM phones lose reception regularly in between towns, much like the radio. For this reason we have a CDMA phone in case of emergencies (thanks to Mr Moore for the tip!). About half of the journey was on an unsealed road. Kilometres of loose red gravel on which the car tends to find its own tracks. Thankfully this road was mostly straight meaning that it wasn’t too much work keeping the car heading in the direction that we wanted to head and at the speed we wanted to head there. It was amusing to consult the rear-view mirror and to witness the plumes of red dust left in our wake!

We stopped thrice along the way, firstly in Nannup for a quick stretch of the legs and secondly in Manjimup for a bite to eat. Both towns were remarkably quiet for a Saturday, possibly even quieter that Augusta, one can only imagine what these places are like on a Sunday! Our other stop was at The Four Aces, four huge karri trees believed to be over 300 years old.

The first thing that struck me as we arrived at the hostel in Pemberton was Live After Death (in my opinion the finest of Iron Maiden’s live albums) was playing loudly in the office (in fact it is playing again today), I knew I was going to like it here. We were shown to our room in the villa and told that every Saturday all guests are invited to a free sausage-sizzle. What a nice welcome!

We had a few hours before the barbecue was lit and discovered that there was not only a winery but a brewery on the outskirts of town. We drove up to Jarrah Jack’s Cracker Jack brewery, where I tried all six of their beers ($10 for a rack of six glasses, about a third of a pint each). We picked up a six-pack to take with us to the barbecue. At the barbecue we got chatting to a couple of guys who we’d also met at the previous hostel. We joined them for a couple of drinks at the local pub / restaurant / betting shop / drive-through off-license afterwards. I was glad of those few beers as it meant that I got straight to sleep when I got back to the villa, despite the wedding reception in the hall next door. Sadly, the effects had worn off by the time the cockerel began to herald the crack of dawn this morning. Hey-ho.

After lunch today, we’re planning on climbing a big tree or two. Stay tuned.