Well I'm back from Eungella and now on the exclusive Heron island which is
beautiful, almost unreal, and cut off from the outside world so this is
being typed in an obscenely expensive internet kiosk at $2 for 15 minutes.
Thus...this is just to say that I'm alive and well but you probably won't
be hearing a lot from me until I get back to Gladstone on the afternoon of
Oct 1st (and then fly to Brisbane to catch my plane home).

Last two days in brief:- Trip on a forest cable wire canopy ride, saw a
fruit bat being born in the canopy, more ace platypus watching, helicopter
ride to Heron island, trip in a semi-submersible then an hours snorkling
in lovely warm blue waters right of the beach. Going scuba-ing and reef
edge snorkeling tomoz, and drinking lots of cocktails. What an end to a
holiday...

I surprised myself by sleeping in this morning (8am) which was nice, though I had sort of intended to see the sunrise, oh well.

Today was a Monday, hurray! That meant shops were open again, at least in places that actually had shops. Not that there were any near me, but for the moment all I wanted was Diesel and that could be obtained from a roadhouse just up the road (albeit I had to go to the Roadtrain pump and my tiny weeny little 4x4 looked somewhat dwarfed in that huge space designed for vehicles 20m long). Mackay was a mere hour or so from Bowen along the same featureless roads I've described before, but the town itself was as unedifying as I expected it to be (the Lonely Planet was struggling for things to say about it other than 'compact town centre'). All the breakfast places looked quite shabby too so I ended up sampling a Happy Jack's burger out of curiosity. It's logo looked suspiciously like that of Wimpy but when I studied the wrapping of my bacon double cheese burger it turned out that Happy Jack's was actually a part of Burger King Inc. It still tasted like a Wimpy though, and the bacon in it was really cold sliced ham which was wierd and unexpected. At least there was no beetroot. Oh, something else I read in the (very) small print:- 'Hungry Jack's Vegie Supreme may contain traces of Dairy and/or animal products'. Heh.

Mackay lacked any sort of easily accessible beach or marina to linger on, so I set off for Eungella immediately after my brurgerfast. Eungella rainforest, or at least the bits that are open to the public, is on the top of a mountain range (and indeed Eungella means land of the clouds). Said mountain is visible for miles around and to get to it you pretty much locate it visually and point your car at it, it's as simple as that. And being on a mountain, it means that the temperature is somewhat cooler than down at the coast, the flora and fauna is subtly different, and that the road getting up to it is evil.

I'm really glad I wasn't taking the camper 4WD up to Eungella, I'm not sure it would have made it. Indeed just before the final ascent to the summit, the road was lined with huge warnings:- Do NOT take vehicles long than X metres beyond this point, Road ahead not suitable for caravans - turn back or proceed with caution etc etc. I must admit, it had been a bit of a bitch getting up some of the hills nr Daintree and Kuranda but this one won hands down for sheer incline and windingness. Thankfully my present hire vehicle had a bit of poke and the automaticability of the car coped better than I expected it would, it did more or less what I would have done and at about the speed I would have tried - clever. It gobbled fuel though, then again spending a solid half hour over revving probably does that.

I clumb through lovely sunlit forest with huge cyclads and palms overhead and those blue Emperor butterflies flittering around, juddering on the ocassional grid, skidding on the odd bit of road subsidence, and scaring myself on one or two near vertical 180 degree turns with sheer drops down the mountain face along the side. Then, all of a sudden, the crest of the hill was reached and...it was Derbyshire! I mean it! There were rolling green fields a cows and a dairy farm and dry stone wall - it was bizarre. How? I thought. Why? Perhaps it was just that this place that had the happy coincidence of rain and cool temperatures which permitted a dairy farm, or perhaps I was just hallucinating because I had been away from home too long. Either way, I passed through a brief patch of rural Britain landscape, then plunged back into the forest and to the Broken River Retreat.

What had attracted me to this place (apart from the mod cons) was its very grand claim that it was sited on *the* most reliable place on the planet to view wild platypuses. I'd arrived a little too early for check-in so I went hunting for this legendary site to kill time, and sure enough there were two platypii viewing platforms within minutes of the retreat: one under Broken River Bridge which is just outside the Retreat's front door, and one a further 200m along just down river. I paused for a while at each, half hoping for a basking platypus to dive off a rock for me and do its thing, but I saw nothing and wasn't too concerned as the quoted prime times for platypus activity are apparently the hours before dusk and the hours before sunrise - and this was dinnertime. It was interesting to view quality platypus real estate though - they seem to like similar things to voles actually i.e. soft banks, slow running water, and a nice silty bottom. Okay voles eat reeds and platypus eat worms that they find under rocks, but apart from that they are alarmingly similar. I knew I had some sort of affinity with these creatures...

Once I had checked in properly (under the watchful eye of the local Kookaburra), I had a quick drive around all the local viewing spots (all with extremely impressive views down the valley) and a quick look at our 'local shopping centre' (16km away at the bottom of the valley - Finch Hatton with it's single grocery store and place that sells petrol by the can). Then I rushed back to base and bagged myself a place on the platypus viewing platform. There was already a crowd gathering, some with sleeping bags and flasks, others had huge cameras set up who were testing the surroundings with light meters. This was twitcher country.

I knew the score though, I knew what I was up against. I had packed a wooly jumper, insect repellent, a book + head torch, my camera, and four beers + bottle opener. Thus I spent the first hour of non-platypus activity in a pleasant fug of DEET and alcohol fumes, and the crowd soon dwindled, first the families, then the parent and child couples, then the couples, until finally only the sad obsessive men with the expensive cameras remained (and me)...

As a plattyspotter you soon suss what to look out for, namely a telltale pocket of bubbles and ripples that are distinct from the bubbles produced by the very many terrapins that bob around the river, and distinct from the many ripples produced by the thousands of overfed water boatman that skitter about. As soon as you've figured it out, you start imparting the wisdom on your neighbours in an irritating condescending whisper, and they usual nod and thank you thinking 'what an irritating arsehole'...and then eventually go tell someone else what you told them. Thus the platypus inma is passed down through the generations...

Following this time honoured tradition, when the first platypus surfaced an elderly italian with a huge video camera on a tripod nudged me and shared with me The Knowledge. I thanked him, despite having figured out the Knowledge for myself by this time, and ended up pointed out the platty to a new-comer 10mins afterwards and telling him the very same Knowledge myself. They were grateful, I got to wink like I'd been platty spotting all my life, and everyone was happy. Funny old business.

Platypus are lovely. On Broken River it looks like about 4 platypii 'work' the stream, all with their own loosely overlapping patches. They bob up, have a quick breath of air (their legs moving fantically) then dive under and you can see them wiggling their head from side to side as they search under all the rocks for goodies. One bobbed up in front of our platform and then swum all around the edge of the bank we were on, looking under rocks. Everyone scrabbled for their cameras, and most realised milliseconds afterwards that it was too dark to get a decent picture plus the platty were moving too darn fast anyway, and gave up. For my own part, I have at least 5 very blurred, nearly black photos of a slow moving stream with a dark blodge in the middle that might have been a platypus. Some, I suspect, now have hours of video tape that is completely blank...

Personally though, I got a huge buzz out of seeing a real live wild duck billed platypus diving a foot away from me. It's a deeply silly and yet lovely little creature, otter-like in its behaviour. Also, unlike certain types of endangered species who almost seem to be making it deliberately difficult for themselves, the platypus does seem to be a nice honest practical creature that's just trying to do it's thing and not get endangered at all. I have a feeling all future Platypus protection charities has suddenly authomatically got my support...

When it finally got too dark to see anything, the crowd dispersed and I returned to my hotel/resort thing and a waiting evening meal in the restaurant. Just when I thought the evening couldn't get exciting enough they had one final trick up their sleeves, namely a possum feeding platform outside of the resturant window so we could sit eating our meals while wild possums ate kitchen scraps beside us.

What a brilliant place! I was so chuffed by the end of dinner...the only negative point about the whole place was that mobile phone reception cut just before the bizarre Derbyshire-like stretch on the plateau of the hill so I had to drive up the hill to send a blog entry. God it was wierd too, I set off up to the summit and suddenly the road was swathed in thick fog, or maybe it was cloud. Either way I parked in a deserted picnic spot in pitch black with swirling mist in my headlamps to send my blog, and I really got creeped out, half expected a werewolf to leap out at me at any second.

Mail sent, egg laying mammals spotted, I felt I had earned a rest. I headed back to my room and almost almost immediately hit the sack. It didn't fell too bad this time though, it had a noble purpose. After all, platypus are most active just after dawn they say, and no bugger is going to be stupid enough to get up pre-dawn except me are they...?

Well I was entering another free roaming section of my Walkabout, and this time I got a regular 4x4 (as opposed to a camper) booked at the Avis up the road from me. It all went smoothly, they had heard of me and didn't turn me away which was a plus, and I got the same surge of excitement I always get sitting in a vehicle that requires you to climb up into it...until I realised the damn thing was an automatic!

It was my first time with an automatic and I still think it's like driving a tonka toy. You put the thing into 'Drive' and it starts moving as soon as you take your foot off the brake pedal. I means you don't have to make handbrake starts, but inevitably its idea of acceleration and gear change is different to mine and it's just...not quite right. Very education though, especially the first couple of times I pressed the brake pedal with my left foot, expecting there to be a clutch there...

In practical terms though it was pretty easy to learn how to use, and it does make eating and driving a whole lot easier. And once you get on the highway you don't change gear much anyway, even with a manual shift so I can't really whinge. I wonder how it performs on big hills though? Especially considering its meant to be a 4x4.

Anyway, getting the car made me realise this is when I'm happiest, bimbling along exploring at my own rate, looking at what I want to see. Driving really gets you in touch with the place you are exploring, I reckon. The slopes, the road condition, the cryptic signs you don't understand, the unfathomable systems for obtaining fuel and food and toilet facilities. The tour bus came a close second, but I like it best of all when I've got an open road ahead of me and the radio blasting and the windows down - aaah.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. After I got the car I didn't immediately hit the road and start doing impressions of Thelma and Louise, no I went to look at Townsville Sunday Market. Townsville had been utterly dead yesterday - very surprising for a Saturday but I hadn't seen more than four people together on the streets all day if you discount Maggie Island. But I had woken up today, looked down from my balcony, and seen the mall below teeming with people, a welcome change to the surroundings. So I checked myself out and packed the car, then wandered around, expectations already adjusted for seeing a lot of worthless Ozzie tat, but completely unprepared for seeing precisely the same tat I see in craft markets in the UK that I had hitherto assumed was unique to us. I quote, as an example, something I saw at Grantham Game Show namely old drinks bottles that had been reheated, and flattened and turned into clocks and cheese boards. Thought they were the invention of an enterprising Brit but clearly its an international business. The whole craft stall market is probably part of a global syndicate touting croquetted toilet roll covers and doiley covered jam to every corner of the globe. Frightening.

I treated myself to another eggs benedict before I left, then struck out for Bowen (a random point picked between Townsville and Mackay to break the journey up and cited to have nice beaches). I finally got to witness a proper Aussie road - not a scenic one or a challenging one, but a proper long cornerless utility road that crossed flat featureless hinterland, broken up by only the ocassional road house and irritating truck that required overtaking. It certainly tested my ability to keep awake. I had to have the radio up particularly loud and the windows down particularly low. I wondered for a while if the car had cruise control but then deliberately didn't look for it because that was just making it too easy to fall asleep behind the wheel.

I meant to have a rest stop at Ayr but it was shut. I'm beginning to realise that the Aussies take their Sundays seriously, or perhaps that the Brits have just got used to being exploited into working 7 days a week now. Either way the whole of Australia seems to down tools at the weekend and you can't get food, fuel, nuthin'. I think the only things open are roadhouses and even then only very grudgingly and you're usual greeting with a sneering 'Waddayer want mate?'.

So yes, my planned shop and grub stop in Ayr was curtailed by the entire town being devoid of humans bar one dog, wandering around pretending to be a dingo. Thus I pressed determinedly on to Bowen and got there a couple of hours later, feeling a bit twitchy.

Bowen is a bit spread out. You get signs for Bowenshire a good 80km away from the town, and the town CBD is also miles from the outskirts and the initial faded 'Welcome to Bowen' sign. It appears to be based around a salt works, or at least there is a fair amount of heavy industry around and lots of flat open plains with drying water. It certainly isn't anything related to sugar cane, though there were a few plantations close by the township.

I drove around Bowen randomly for a bit and then finally admitted to myself that I had no idea where my motel was and I should have downloaded a map. Working it out from the address though, it was claiming to be directly on the Bruce Highway and Bowen was a turn off from it so I gambled and rejoined the highway for a bit longer, looking for signs. Sure enough, it was about 5km down the road from Bowen - hardly the nice central location it was claiming - and when I checked in I had to wake up the receptionist who had fallen asleep in front of the football with a small ratty little dog on his chest. He had a glass eye and a funny look about him, and when I got in my room and saw my bath/shower looked exactly like the one in Bates Motel I started to get a little scared. At least there was no view of a house on a hill, just a very windswept ocean peninsula. None the less,I immediately dumped my bags and headed off back into Bowen central.

I wanted something to eat, anything. I had been given a free advertisational map by Bate's one eyed receptionist and it listed about 5 Bowen restaurants - none of which opened on a Sunday. It also listed a number of take-out joints - most of which just served breakfast and closed before noon. I would have even settled for a packet of crisps but none of the grocers were open and the bottle shop doesn't serve anything with vitamins or protein in it - it's a company mission statement. So how the hell do people eat round here? I'll tell you - Bowen has three fabulous, drop dead gorgeous beaches, and slap bang on each one is a Butlins-esque resort full of loud drunk youths and working class aussie families, which supplies all-in deals so said youths and tired mothers get fed and watered gratis and don't have to worry about anything except getting laid or whether little Wayne and Muriel are going to swim too far out and drown themselves. It means that more maverick explorers like myself are utterly excluded and left to starve. We also get displaced onto the outer beaches with the pointier sand and slightly less blue water. I still had a quick swim though, though I was half expecting some burly resort guy to leapt out and shoo me away at any second.

By cruising down Bowens grid system in a systematic fashion, I finally found one lone food establishment open - a takeaway pizza - and I leapt on the opportunity though it was probably one of the worst pizza I've had in a long time. The only thing that improved it was that I took it to a secluded cove away from the Butlins camps, and me and a seagull shared it while I watched a truely beautiful sunset occur over the headlands. Bowen is very pretty. It's just a shame that it's a ghost town on a Sunday night and full of arseholes that's all.

When it got dark and me and the seagull had finished our pizza, I set off back to Bate's. I put a chain on the door to deter psycho-esque shower stabbings and tried to stay awake but couldn't, I was progammed to Queensland hours now and dark meant sleep, despite me having a good book to read and entertaining crap on tv. It also suggested that I'd be up at bloody dawn again, further confusing me - crikey in England I'd happily sleep til gone afternoon, what's going on here? Oh well, more time to spend at Eungella I suppose. Oh yes, I was meant to be staying in a open sided tree hut on a platypus filled creek in the Eungella rainforest on Mon/Tues but I had a last minute change of heart. This was based loosely around my previous experiences in swags being freezing cold and eaten alive by insects - I just couldn't face that again so I cancelled my treehouse booking and rang up a slightly more costly resort that offered you your own lodge with aircon and soft beds (and mozzie nets, and a restaurant that does you afternoon picnic hampers), and was minutes away from *the* most reliable viewing spot for platypuses. I feel slightly ashamed that I have chosen a comfortable mod-con chalet for a back to basics treehut commune with nature but...I have 25 mozzie bites on one leg alone, there must be more comfortable ways to commune with nature...

Okay, something had to go wrong at some point I guess, it was all going was too smoothly. It wasn't what I expected though - I thought the complicated flights yesterday would be my undoing but instead it was the next morning when the dive tour pickup van arrived to pick up a couple of people...and not me. I wasn't on the list, they hadn't heard of me. Bemused, I showed the van guy my internet receipt but he still shook his head and denied me entry to his bus, so I had to slink away back to my room, annoyed and not a little peeved that I had to get up at 5am to learn all this. My theory is that I should have rang yesterday to reconfirm. They didn't say it in the trip notes but it's something I did with The Spirit trip and it would have been a perfect time for me to drop off peoples official lists. It's a pain though because I couldn't have rung them really because I was in transit most of the time yesterday. I also really wanted to do the Yongala as well. Oh well, a further excuse to have to come back to Oz, and I'll just have to wait until I get back home to see if they charged me or not for what I thought I was booked on but didn't get to go to. I just knew something was going to go wrong in Townsville...

So. Well. Having been turned so shamefacedly away from the dive tour, that left me with a day in Townsville to kill. I wandered round all the (shut) shops and eventually cheered myself up with eggs benedict and a breakfast lager at 9am in the first cafe that opened, and I studied my Lonely Planet Guide for entertainment suggestions. It told me that (among other things to do) there was a big Aquarium in Townsville with a part model of the Yongala in it (so at least I could see fishes somehow) and next door was an iMax Dome - like a regular iMax only the screen is dome shaped over your head and the film is specially distorted to create the illusion of wrap aroundnessness. That sounded like a reasonable way to pass the time, so I walked on over.

iMax dome - not convinced. The dome screen itself was quite impressive and as you sat in the middle, the area of projection completely wrapped round your field of view. It looked to be made of individual curved square panels and kind of resembled an inverted Zepplin. The place was completely empty though apart from me and some guy who looked like he's slept there overnight, and so it was that the film itself was the usual iMax fare, i.e. a very pretty looking film about the ocean that was without any sort of educational substance - but it wasn't dark enough so you could see the dome panels behind the projection and it ruined the illusion. Or perhaps I was just feeling grumpy about the diving and being unfair...

Next: Reef HQ - it reminded me a great deal of the big aquarium in the Wirral (The Blue Planet) because it also has a great big long tube that you walk through while fish swim over your head. They weren't kidding about it having a model of the Yongala in it though - all along one side of said tube walkway was a fake sunken ship off which all sorts of coral and seaweed was stuck and various fish were swimming around. It was a massive tank, at least the size of your average open plan office environment, and superbely laid out with an Authetic Wave Making Machine (tm) that pushed water convincingly round all the environments and kept everything ticking along.

I had my first scuba nerd moments though. First off, round every corner I was seeing things and thinking 'I've seen that on a dive!'. Also though, the walkway and many other areas of the large tank were meant to recreate various particular areas of the great barrier reef including things you find on the sides of bommies, what you find in reef lagoons etc etc and in each case I recognised the general environment and thought 'I've swum through that!' but then noticed that some of the fish patterns were wrong and certain things were swimming in a way that I never saw them do when I was scubaing (or more to the point, they were just swimming around randomly instead of shoaling or hunting like they were meant to). That suddenly made me realise that aquariums, just like zoos, can be very very good but they are still artificial environments and the occupants can tell...even the fish. That it was affecting things as subtle as shoaling and swimming patterns shocked me however (chiefly because I thought fish were dumber than that). Some things were pretty obvious though like the parrot fish that was swimming round and round and round one window of the tank ceaselessly like one of those caged lions you used to see in poorly run zoos that just paced from one end of the cage to the other all day or rocked from side to side endlessly. There was also the turtle that was endlessly swimming from the bottom of the tank to a corner just above one tank window and back again - they don't do stuff like that in the wild. Perhaps fish don't have 30second memories after all. Or perhaps as soon as you've seen anything out in the wild, be it fish or beast, seeing it in captivity becomes a disturbing experience. Either way, the aquarium was very high quality but it didn't 'alf make me think.

One exhibit particulalry wowed me though, the glow in the dark fish. You see plenty of these programs about deep sea life and they usually wheel out those fish with bioluminescent patches under their eyes so they look, in the pitch black, like a couple of headlamps floating around. This exhibit was in a pitch black room and it was a tank of them! Me and all the kids in the room simultaneously went wild and pressed out noses against the tank. They got dragged off by their Mum's though whereas I could hang around until my eyes got used to the dark, and slowly I could discern the sandy bottom of the tank and then the sillouette of the fish that were moving around. There were even two types of fish in there - one with slightly duller and smaller headlamps that I had assumed earlier was an old or sick fish. It was dead good.

...Because I had got up so bloody early cos of that stupid dive trip, I had now already done one aquarium and one cinema trip and it was still only lunchtime. I couldn't be arsed going to a cafe, and stopped in a McDonald's instead and had a 'McOz' which is more or less your standard quarter pounder only - very bizarrely - with a huge slice of beetroot instead of gerkin (!). Then I found myself somehow at the ferry terminal to Magnetic Island (aka 'Maggie') and sort of...drifted onto it, without any serious purpose to go but also without any serious purpose to be anywhere else either.

The ferry ride is just 25 minutes and many residents of Townsville commute to Maggie and vice versa, indeed I could see it from my hotel balcony and its in spitting distance of the city. The ferry itself is a smallish seacat style thing, and the ferry terminal is a quiet domestic affair. When we disembarked, we quickly split down into our two main constituents namely the people who milled about like they were lost (tourists) and the people who immediately started marching purposefully in some random direction (locals). I was feeling playful so I followed the locals, and ended up in the short stay carpark near the only (as I later discovered) open supermarket on that half of the island. Amused, I looked for beer but found none and settled for bundaberg gingerbeer instead. Bundaberg is a big name in Oz, chiefly for its rum&cola mix in a can which I think is disgusting but lots of people drink it. I didn't know it did other stuff though. Perhaps it's an Aussie Schweps.

Anyhoo, I'd found a free map of the island at the ferry station and used it to navigate myself to the nearest beach,,just a short stroll from the ferry terminal. It was lovely too - deserted just like the rest of Townsville - and I walked the length of the palm fringed beach barefoot at the edges of the foamy blue waves with barely another soul in sight.

I like looking at things that get washed up. Around most of this area, bits of dead reef are two a penny and if you keep your eye out you can pick up lovely textured bits of bleached white coral - indeed I've already got a bag full. But on this particular beach I saw loads of cuttlefish bones, most odd. I didn't know there were that many alive, let alone so many to have one washed up every foot or so on the beach. I collected a bunch and arranged them in a sun-like pattern on the beach, just to confuse passers by. Didn't keep any though, I think they'd get crushed on the way back home.

I wandered up the beach until a rocky promontary and a backpacker hostel stopped my progress, and then turned round and walked back in the opposite direction. I didn't notice on the way there but I certainly noticed on the way back that a couple of said backpacker prats were buzzing up and down the esplanade mindlessly on a bright pink moke trying to express their manhood by wolf whistling all the women they past whilst dangling out of said vehicle and gesturing. A moke seems to be the local island transport - its basically a golfcart and it just about does the island max speed of 60km, you can hire them from Nelly bay (the township nearest the ferry terminal). It certainly beats walking the 10km to the other end of the island, but no matter how much you posture and whistle, there is no way any bloke can avoid looking gay while zipping down the road in a barbie pink golf cart. Consequently I met their exuberant calls with a cheerful and knowing wave.

I arrived a bit early back at the terminal so I went and stood next to a family who were feeding the fish off the marina. A huge shoal of various tropical reef fish had gathered and they were doing their best impression of a school of pirana by reducing a salad sandwich to a skeliton in less than a minute. They were a bit flummoxed by the orange though, and kicked it around like a football - they were still trying to work out what to do when we were called back on the ferry and it's probably still out there, now out to sea.

Got back to my hotel in time for sunset from my balcony and a beer from the local bottle shop, and then I treated my self to an Aussie Stockyard Steak from the restaurant and a nice hot *bath* (because most of these places just have showers these days and a bath is somewhat of a luxury). Conked out a 9pm again. God, jetlag isn't the thing you should worry about here, it's the whole up at sunrise, bed at sunset thing. I'm completely confused, wanting beer at breakfast and breakfast at supper - gah.

I'm getting a hire car tomorrow and driving down to Eungella - an ancient mountain rainforest rife with platypuses and I'm not leaving until I've spotted one! It's a big 4x4 again too hee hee hee (maniacal laughter)

This country is too goddamn big - all I did was travel today. I had to get to Townsville and the only way to fly to anywhere from Alice is to fly to Cairns or Brisbane, and then get a connecting flight. Thus I was going to Cairns, and my connecting flight to Townsville was 40mins later. I read all the rules for domestic flights and 40mins seemed an ok connection time, albeit cutting it a little fine perhaps. However what worried me was that it left no time for delays, and I'd always had this particular day marked as the day where things were most likely to go wrong.

Sure enough, I got to Alice and discovered the plane was running 15mins late, which then increased to 30mins as I waited. The check-in lass was quite cheerful about it though and assured me they'd probably make the time up in flight. I didn't believe her though and I was biting my nails all through the time we were in the air, even upsetting the woman next to me who turned out to be from Knutsford ('I travel half way round the globe only to meet someone who lives 10 miles away from me!'). She was also one of the people drinking champagne and getting in the way at the Uluru sunset the other day. Eee it's a small world and all that.

We finally got to Cairns a mere 25mins late, which meant I still had time to catch the boarding of my next flight if I sprinted. It was then that I learnt that the Townsville flight was delayed by 40mins because of a 'late inbound plane' (probably the one I was on so I needn't have worried). This delay increased to an hour as I hung around, and wound up absorbing another earlier flight to Townsville that had got cancelled.

I eventually got into Townsville at 7 in the evening v.pissed off with all the messing around. The only thing that cheered me up was that my hotel turned out to be a 20 story circular turret slap-bag in the middle of town, and my room was on the 11th floor with a balcony looking out over the town and the sea, and a spectacular view. Room service was a bit scabby though - my butter chicken curry with garlic naan looked exceedingly microwaved and was even in similar proportions (i.e. f*ck all) and in one of those little subdivided plastic trays. Oh, and one of the beers I ordered turned out to be filled with water, a standard scam for minibar screwtops. I complained needless to say, and didn't touch the minibar stuff.

Oh I tell a lie, I did manage to do one single constructive thing with my time that day - back at Alice I posted my jeans and coat plus some other sundries to myself. God the Aussie postal system is a paranoid one! All I had were two smallish innocent looking parcels and they refused to send them for me until I had shown them my passport and stated my reason for sending and filled in an in depth questionaire about the contents and submitted myself to a strip search. I bet they only gave me hassle cos I had a British accent, I bet they let Aussie citizens send drugs, endangered species and illegal weapons if they want to. All I wanted to send were a couple of pairs of trousers...

Anyway, this was a big event for me because my pack is suddenly a few pounds lighter and this represents a significant improvement in my quality of life.

Oh yes, other things of note: Armed with my new intimate knowledge of Outback roads I thought I'd take a more considered view of what I was seeing from the plane, and I now reckon there are slightly more roads than I had previously considered and the way you spot them (the sealed/part sealed roads anyhow) is that roads are always dead straight (because there isn't anything particularly that needs avoiding out there apart from Uluru) perhaps with the odd sweeping corner or odd right angle turn. Conversely, river beds wiggle a bit more, though when you start getting into the realms of the dirt tracks that lead to...well I never figured out what they led to but the highway is periodically dotted with dirt tracks disappearing off willy nilly...the dirt tracks tend to wiggle a whole lot more and it's still pretty difficult to tell them from creeks.

It was another early night for me because tomorrow I had a 6:30am pickup for the Yongala wreck dive trip. Bloody aussies. Why do they have to all be so god damned healthy and such early risers? Oh! Because they live somewhere fantastic that's why - grr).

I was awoken by the usual kick in the kidneys by Sally, and dawn chorus of one very confused bird that clearly hadn't noticed that dawn was still 2 hours away and it was pitch dark. Breakfast was a subdued affair as usual and we rolled up our swags and ate our toast and jam in silence, though this time there was a degree of extra faffing cos we had to gather together our things for leaving the bus tomorrow. One Irish lass commented that she was bound to leave something behind because 'this has become my home' she said and gestured to her seat on the bus. I hadn't spotted that, but yes, denied of the personal space of a tent because the swags, we had all now taken our seats as our own and every one was unique, just as if we'd put up some wallpaper and laid down new carpet. Mine was identifiable by the two cushions, book jammed down the back, festering walking boots underneath and secret stash of diet coke down the side. Other people had jumpers, cd's, footballs, sarongs, all sorts.

We didn't have time to go to an official sunrise viewing spot today so instead, in true cheap ass backpacker style, pulled up at the side of the road close to sunrise, sprinted up a nearby dune and watch it from there. It was still a nice view, and the dune had been untouched prior to our arrival and was all covered in lizard tracks and things.

Then...then there was simply hours and hours of dry earth. Hours. Hours and hours. Dry. Earth. Hours. At least it allowed some quality time for catching up on the moBlog.

We said goodbye to Sally at Jim's Place (we had now ceased to be amazed by Dinky the singing Dingo). She was taking the bunch that joined us from The Ghan to Rainbow valley (after a quick nap in the shade in her swag under a tree), and the rest of us had to swap bus to be taken back to Alice the 'quick' way. This was another 1 hours drive and it was an odd experience because suddenly the bus was all clean again, we all went instinctively to the same seats we'd occupied on the old bus but somehow it didn't feel the right...and the driver wasn't Sally, he was all uptight and formal and had a neat uniform and used the tour guide headset mic to tell us crap about Alice instead of Sally who would randomly pull up at the side of the road and turn round to speak to us, and then abuse us for being bloody poms or something when we asked awkward questions. We slowly realised we had lost a good 'un in Sally, and the only way from here was down.

Thankfully we were back in Alice in a jiffy (where the term 'jiffy' is employed relatived speaking and still employed the odd 100km). We said our goodbyes as we all got dropped off at hotels (with most getting dropped off at Melenka's - a backpacker place described in the Lonely planet book as 'a good place if you just want to fall into your bunk after a hard night's partying') and I finally arrived at my quiet little motel just round the back of Todd Mall about 12 noon.

God I was tired. It still wasn't the afternoon yet and I'd already been up over 6 hours and travelled +400km. I wanted so much just to shower and fall into bed but I couldn't, I still had things to do. With an immense amount of effort I forced myself out of my room again and onto a desert park transfer bus which left every hour and a half from Todd Mall. It (not surprisingly) took you to the Desert Park experience (tm), a nature park dedicated to the arid wastes of the outback. You got one of those self-guide audio tour things and you wandered round three themed areas - Sandy desert, Dry river bed & Desert Woodland - while the audio tour tried desperately to persuade you that the outback was a great place really honest and you tried not to knock your headphones off as you battled with the flies.

I'm usually pretty forgiving, but for once the audio tour failed to convince me of the beauty and richness of the local area. It increased my respect for a number of species of shrub though, like the spineflex which seems to survive off fresh air and gets rid of competing neighbouring by catching fire itself (by dint of being full of lots of flammable resins), torching everything else, then regenerating itself from its ashes. I still think the outback is a terrible hot, dry, prickly, itchy, dusty, nasty place though and my respect goes out to anyone/anything that manages to tolerate the place. That said, I reckon the residents of Alice have turned the fly swatting action into an unconcious reflex action and I bet if you took one of them and matter transported them to the Arctic they'd still be flicking the air around their face every 3 secs without even noticing they are doing it.

I got back from the Desert Park about 5 ish slightly fried from the sun and frazzled from all the fly attention, then I quickly nipped to the local bottle shop in the mall. After that I spent some quality time in the guest laundry washing red dust out of all my clothes and supping lager. I ended the day with a room service feast of camel steaks and emu with a croc confit starter, and a 9pm coma from which I never rose from until my alarm shook me awake the following day...

I was woken up at 4:50am by the now familar boot of Sally, our tour guide, in the middle of my back - it was a courtesy service she gave to everyone to ensure a prompt departure. Soon the air was full of yawns and hasking coughs (because a lot of us were either suffering from acute woodsmoke inhalation or emphasema caused by all the red dust). Whatever people say about sleeping under the stars being romantic, the painful truth is it's cold, dirty, and you get eaten alive. No mosquitos because there's no water my arse, I've now got +30 bites. I'm counting down the hours before I can get into a proper bed again.

We had a hasty breakfast, then drove to the Kaja Tjuta Sunrise Viewpoint (tm) which we shared with considerably less people than yesterday thankfully. You could see The Olgas/Kaja Tjatu on one side and Ayers Rock/Uluru on the other, and we were priviliged enough to watch the sun come up from behind The Rock in a blood red sky, and then light up Kaja Tjuta. It was absolutely fabulous (better than the sunset IMHO).

Once the show was over, we quickly buzzed over to Kaja Tjata. When the government was handing back the monuments, they insisted that one of either Uluru or Kaja Tjuta was to be open for the public to climb. The Anangu eventually chose to close Kaja Tjuta because it is more sacred. It is a 'men's place' where all the men's most sacred rituals (inma) take place. If women decide to sneak up and spy on the men's rituals and are caught, they can be killed, that's how sacred it is. Not only that, but only the appropriately initiated boys are permitted to be privvy too, and this initiation is done from elder to appropriate younger male relative by word of mouth only, and not spoken to anyone else - it's a bit like the Masons really except without the silly handshake. This 'learning' is done by the father taking the son along 20km walks around the rocks telling him names for things and how to find things and use things, and songs and stories related to the path, and if the son gets anything wrong they both have to go back to the beginning of the walk and start again. ...or maybe that *is* how the Mason's do it, I don't know.

Of course Sally's refreshing take on this is that Kaja Tjuta is a men's place because most of the Olgas look...um (considers the audience and gauges accordingly) ...they look an awful lot like womens bits. She's got a point actually - pornography on geology, you should look up some pictures and see what I mean. Especially when your stoned on gum tree leaves too.

Yes, we were also shown yet more plants that were hallucinagenic when eaten, or got you stoned (which explains something about the Anangu culture) and a whole bunch of things that could cure colds or cuts by being rubbed on the skin or burnt and the smoke inhaled, or boiled and the broth drunk. The Anangu were actually disease free until the white man arrived, and this is unsurprising really when the whole landscape is one giant cough sweet.

Another random fact - the Anangu of central australia don't actually play the digeridoo, only the northern clans do that. And according to their law, if women play the digeridoo they are made infertile. Christ, next they'll be saying the boomerangs actually come from Iceland and make you blind if you throw them too often...

Kaja Tjatu is a bunch of bumpy looking rocks that look like a whole bunch of bosoms made of red rock laid out in a field. Kings Creek had some of these features to but these things are huge, at least 1.5km tall, some even have scrub and trees on top. The centre is closed because its sacred, but you can walk around it and there is one walk permitted through it called The Valley of the Winds and it's said that it only hows a gale through it if you aren't a good spirit (it was quite gusty so clearly some of us had things on our conscience). Once we had got to the heart of the walk, Sally took the lightweights back, and the heavyweights (incl. myself) circumnavigated the rocks and got back to the bus an hour or two later.

Once we were all gathered together again the sun was just reaching it's zenith, so we fled back to the campsite and hide in the shade, some sleeping in the shade, some frying themselves by the pool, and some cowering in the darkest recesses of the covered areas to escape the scalding heat and viscious radiation levels. We hung around until the sun had swung round again and the sting had been taken out of it, then bused over to Uluru for a second time, this time parking up right at the base of it.

Uluru is a big bugger, it has to be said. Whether or not to climb Uluru though...there was a question. In truth, the council close the walk anyway for about 200 days of the year if it looks like rain, or it looks like its going to be too hot, or because a ritual is going on, or someone has died - so mostly the choice is made for you. And indeed loads of people fall off Uluru and the locals hate it because each death or 'Sorry Business' requires a period of about 4 weeks mourning and people cutting themselves as a sign of respect. In their culture is someone dies in a house they just up sticks and leave and never go back to the place (because wherever you are born or die you leave a little part of your spirit). Also in the cultural centre certain pictures in glossy booklets and billboards were taped over with a little note saying 'this photo has been covered as a mark of respect to the deceased as per Anangu law'.

For my own part, I took one look at it and said 'sod that!'. Its a path up an exposed face of the rock and no steps have been carved out, you just have to shuffle up a slippery sheer face clinging on to a chain, often 100s of metres up and totally exposed. Using my camera zoom I had a look at the people going up and some were looking very pale and scared, some were turning round and descending on their bums, and the rest were progressing very slowly and carefully. I'm not good with heights, so I stayed on terra firma. And at least I could then claim I didn't climb the rock to respect the Anangu's beliefs...

Of course there was other entertainment at Uluru other that the climb (which only three of our party decided to do). There was the extremely lightweight 1.6km Mala walk which took in a few caves and paintings, and then there was the full on 9.4km base walk which I did, allowing you to quietly walk all around the rock and stare at it intimately.

The base walk can get a bit frustrating sometimes. Many areas of it haven't just been cordoned off, but there is also a ban on photography (because the Anangu believe that if you photograph something you take a little part of it away - hence why you have to cover up pictures of the dead). Its annoying because the scared bits are also the best bits, all the interesting caves and exciting rock features.

I am sort of getting it in terms of the Anangu belief system now. Basically in ancient times, the times of creation, the land was filled with mythical beasts which were huge animals that behaved like people, and they sprung out of the rock and the earth and returned to it again at the end of it and formed all sorts of rock formations that look like creatures. This is why everything looks like something round here and has a tale. The most illustrative of this and the whole basis of the Tjukurpa (which translates sort of as 'the law' but is actually a set of stories, rituals and ways of behaving more akin to our Bible) is as follows:-

There is a green patch on the side of Uluru near a cave. The Tjukurpa for that feature is the a huge blue tongued lizard once lived there. One day it was hungry and went out hunting and came across an injured Emu with a spear in its side. Now it knew that the spear meant it was another mans kill and it would be wrong to take it and eat it itself, but the lizard did so anyway. Of course, soon the men whose kill it was came along and asked the Lizard had it seen an injured emu go by - the lizard quickly hid the carcass and said no. Then he cut it up and carried it back his cave, though he was in so much of a hurry that he dropped pieces as he went and the men found the pieces and knew it would be a trail to the thief, and so followed him back to his cave. There, they lit a fire at the base of the cave and choked to Lizard out, and the green mark is the mark it made on the rock as it fled the cave, though the men killed him anyway.

The story has a couple of layers. It explains a fundamental law i.e don't steal another mans kill, and it is also locked into a moralistic tale that is easy to remember and pass down, and is linked to a feature on the rock to remind people of the tale, and to remind them to pass the story on. Thus the whole land has stories linked to it and you can see various animals from the time of creation that have been turn to rock (like the turtle or the winking cat at Kings Creek) or marks of adventures (like the green mark on Uluru). Part of initiation was to be walked round all the sacred sites and learn all the stories and therefore all the law and wisdom. Not only that, but because there is so much to learn, the information had been cleverly split into mens learning and womens learning and each sex only has obligation to memorise and pass down their stories and songs. Not only that, but some inma have different versions with more information depending on how initated you are. These inma are different for each region and your birthright in that region carries an obligation the learn and pass on this knowledge, but only the knowledge of that region so each tribe has different inma and stories/dreamings - and this is the whole basic workings of the Tjukurpa.

Practical upshot: The basewalk was very pretty but I couldn't take photos of it because most of it was either a sacred men's area or women's area. Good stuff though and I was knackered by the end of it. Thankfully the sunset watching was much more lowkey this time and we saw it from the campsite lookout this time, enabling us to stroll back to our campsite when we'd had enough.

The problem with swags is no-one has personal space and this was starting to tell on some people now. The friendliness was fraying a bit and more people were hiding in corners reading books or wandering off. Thankfully we had to be up at 4:50am again for the long haul back to Alice and that gave most people the excuse to go to bed immediately after dinner/supper. There was a bit of digeridoo and guitar playing going on by the fire but only the really hardcore socialites hung on for any length of time.

Only one more night in the swag, thank god for that. Stars are very nice but remember,you can look out of a tent door at them just as effectively and at least tents have mossie nets. At least I haven't got any bite on my face yet I suppose...

Sleeping in the swag was a perculiar experience. I remember feeling a cold at one point, then warm at another. The fact was though that I set the alarm for 4:45am and when I saw that everyone was sleeping I made the mistake of lying there looking at the stars for a while, and the next thing I knew Sally was kicking me awake, I'd missed breakfast and the bus was about to go.

I leapt up and mobilised myself at hyperspeed, so in the end I wasn't the last one on the bus after all, another couple had overslept too (though they 'hadn't been sleeping' hinted Sally later).

We set off at 6am (still pitch black) and raced the dawn, making sure we were at the base on King's Canyon (which is only 32km from Kings Creek) when it arrived. The King's Canyon walk is only 6km long but was cited at taking three hours and there was all sorts of warnings on signposts everywhere about rememering to talk enough water, and to cover up and the dangers of sunstroke and dehydration. We were there at dawn though when it was lovely and cool and a refreshing breeze washed off the rocks. There was a sharp 150m climb but then everything was a lovely easy amble over baked red mustone, looking at all the geological features and down into this valley (all nicely set off by the rising sun).

Apparent the aborigines used to call this place the garden of eden, and the reason for this is the valley has been created from a collapse of the rock, and has resulted in some of the base of it being under the water table, thus hidden way in this terrible scorched desert is a cool blue pool, fed by underlying ground water and trapped rain, and protected from evaporation by the steep cliffs of the valley. The Aborigines used to save this place, and only hunt it during times of hardship because it was one of the few places that had food all year round and could be used as a reliable backup.

Other interesting Aboriginal facts: the rocks round here has been weathered into huge rounded lumps and the tribes have made up various stories about giant cats or turtles lying down to sleep and being turned to stone etc. though sometimes its a bit hard to spot the shapes and Sally reckons alot of it could be attributed to a local bush whose leaves, if eaten, make you hallucinate for a week. The tribes also used to have their own law enforcement in the form of men with feathers on their feet (to spread their tacks so they couldn't be tracked) who would sneak up on wrong doers and squeeze the sap of another type of bush in their eyes and blind them. This doesn't go on anymore but apparent if you look closely at tribe members you may see scars on the backs of their knees or in their elbows or perhaps even missing bits of fingers or toes - this is how the tribes keep order now. Wonder if they've considered administering papercuts to the bits of flesh between the fingers? That would keep me in line for sure anyway.

We did a circuit of the rim of the valley and then a look at the cool still pool in the middle that really was a welcome florish of life. Then we plodded back to the van, had an orange to spruce us up (it was still only 10am though the sun had started to get mean now) and began the long long slog to Uluru.

Uluru is a dry community, on request of the tribal women. This means the only waku (means liquor...or perhaps wakuma) you can get for miles is a road house 80km away and its vastly over priced. Still got some though because Sally reckoned it would be a "three tinnie sunset". First we went to the campsite (discreetly placed some distance from the very expensive Yulura resort) & set up our swags for the night. Then we drove to the Uluru cultural centre, all the while with the Aussie whinging about how they couldn't see why they had had to change the name of the rock and what a lot of hassle it had caused reprinting everything. The rock loomed, as well it had a right to what with being a 1.6km high red thing sticking out of completety flat surroundings. It loomed like a thing that knew it was being worshipped and jolly well enjoyed it. It loomed over us for our entire drive around it and even afterwards we still got a sense that it was looking over our shoulders constantly.

We had a look around (lots of stuff about the Anangu law & all the icky stuff they ate) then (because it was now just before sunset) quickly buzzed over to the Uluru Sunset Viewing Area (tm). It quickly became apparent that this is what everyone does, and the carpark was full of large coaches out of which were spilling fat aged pink people wearing sunvisors & safari shorts, all ready to drink champagne and eat club sandwiches while standing in the way of everyone else.

We were having none of this. As the token scummy poor people, we got out in our soiled hiking gear, tinnies in hand, and marched up some nearby sanddunes to look at the view there instead. There were still trillions of people but they were more 'our sort' and the wasn't a glass of champagne in sight. Having said that, as the crowd slowly dispersed once the initial sunset had occured, I found myself left alone except with an old guy from Huddersfield who was taking 5 min interval time lapse piccies just like me. He didn't give a damn about champagne and was just hanging out for the black-sky-orange-rock thing (which didn't happen). I wimped and left when I thought I saw my tour bus disappearing off but he looked set for the duration, bless him. I guess he didn't care about a bed for the night either.

Back at the camp we had a barbie and beers to celebrate another sucessful sunset, then went to sleep once more in red dust filled oil skin bags and slept under the stars...

Thank god for an excuse to get out of Alice! I got up at 5:30am to catch a pickup for an Uluru tour (and was stunned to find that recepetion was actually open at that time for me to check out). My tour is one of very many that run out of Alice and as I sat outside the hotel, tour buses of various shapes and sizes kept whizzing past every few minutes, all hastily scrambling for pickups.

Ours did the same thing, doing a tour of Alice's hotels and hostels before stopping off at a depot outside of town to pay for our sleeping bags and tents. Then off we went down the Stuart Highway and plunging into the heart of the Red Centre.

I read a book recently about a lone female doing a long train journey around America, and in it she said that staring at nothing for long periods of time was mesmeric, and actually quite enthralling. I quite agree. Once I'd got myself snuggled up in my seat, I was quite happy to sit and stare at the whole lot of nothing go by for hours and live inside my head. It's as you'd expect, the route is chiefly lots of gum trees, scrub, and red red dust. You might think that after the first 10 minutes you've pretty much seen it all and the only thing to look forward to is the next bend in the road (usually every 100km or so). It's not true though and the more you stare the more the subtleties come through. Gentle undulations, slight changes in shade of the scrub because it is in a different stage of regrowth after a bush fire, soft changes in shade of the dust and the light, changes in the height of the scrub.

This tour is clearly going to be easy on us and stop at every road house for drinks and pee stops. Road houses tend to be every 200km or so, and we stopped at one just before going to the Rainbow Canyon simply called 'Jim's Place'. Jim's place is a dusty fuel station with a bar/cafe attached which is basically just a corrugated iron shed with huge sheet metal doors that you bolt and unbolt to get in and out. The service is surly, and it is populated with leather clad beardie bikes, and camel farmers which look like your typical outback aussie right down to the hat, croc boots, beard and skin that is as brown as a nut. There were also flies, god were there flies. You could only operate by using your hand like a windscreen wiper or (if you have no pride like wot I don't) slapping a fly net over your head and looking like a prat. At least you could get a beer at Jim's place, though you couldn't drink it cos of the fly net.

I was just settling down to thinking Jim's Place was just as much a hole as Alice was when Jim revealed he had a trick up his sleeve, namely Dinky the Singing Dingo. Dinky was chained to a old piano on one corner of the room, and as soon as we came in, Dinky leapt on the piano keyboard and started plonking on the keys with its paws and howling at the top of it's lungs, all out of tune. All our jaws simultaneously dropped and we scrabbled for our cameras, though it turned out later that Dinky sung pretty much for every tour bus that pulled up, and Jim even sat down on a stool next to the piano a little later and told the tale of Dinky and how he was rescued as a pup, taught itself how to play the piano because dingos are actually untrainable, got 'discovered' through various local talent shows, and Jim finally realised Dinky had 'made it' when he was playing Trivial Pursuit on day and got a question 'In which Australian territory does Dinky the World famous singing Dingo live'. Dinky, of course, is an artist foremost and shuns fame and fortune, prefering to perform to small decerning audiences 200 km from anywhere and concentrate on his compositions and charity work. Oh and he doesn't like being petted...

After a brief pee stop at Jim's we set on off up the highway and then pulled off for 20km down a dirt track to get to Rainbow Valley. It's quite small, and in the style of the Arizona Desert rocks, notable because it has four shades of sandstone from red to white and its about the only sticky up thing for miles around. The bus nearly fell apart driving along the dirt track, and even then we still had to hike for 15mins to get to the rocks (again, covered in flies - my face net really saved my sanity and one Irsh girl was offering to buy it off me for $400). The tour guide later asked us whether we reckoned it was worth the pain of wrecking the bus to see the rocks and we all reckoned it was a bit touch and go. Mind you I may have to reconsider previous statements about the outback being desolate having been down such a road. It's just possible that the things I was seeing from the air and assuming were dried river beds are actually officially roads. Roads round here look pretty much like the surrounding not-road, I've learnt, except they may have marginally left gum trees growing on them. From the air, it's easy to suppose there might be nothing there, it all blends together.

Once we'd spent an hour or so at the rocks, it was time for lunch and the only place nearby was - you guessed it - Jim's place again so we stopped there and attempted to eat chicken sandwiches faster than the flies did, and sat in the shade with black clouds around our heads, listening to Dinky perform for all the chopper drivers and 4x4 drivers that pulled up.

After that there was 4-5 hours of driving with odd pee stops at desolate roadhouses that must be compleletly reliant on drops made to them by long distance lorries and things. As we chuntered along, I started to notice tire tracks here and their in the dirt and old beer cans. Sadly, I think a lot of Roo hunting must go on out here - you know, where pissed up f*ckwits with shotguns randomly pull off the highway onto the dirt at night and start careering around in the dark running over things and shooting anything that gets caught in their headlights. We saw a few carcasses on route, sometimes we even pulled over to look at them (because the scenery is *that* featureless), though I doubt it was anything to do with the Roo hunters cos they generally tie their victims to the trunk of their 4x4 before they drive off.

I feel more comfortable with this bunch than the SCUBA bunch. I don't know whether it's just that I felt conversationally inadequate with the divers because I was so new to it all in comparison to them, or simply that the sort of character that is prepared to spend 4+ days on a bus driving through monotonous red and yellow dust is a more chilled out and accepting sort of character. On the boat, you felt a bit excluded if you were on your own. Here you can just sit back and silently let the world slide past your eyes and no-one will think any less of you, and they'll be ready to talk to you again when you break out of your reverie. I like that.

Another thing. Most people on the boat trip were on short holidays or a month or two, and in a hurry. Here, a major proportion have been on the road for 6 months, 9 months, a year, and think of their holiday in terms of 'month 10' or 'week 29'. They're not in a hurry anymore, and all are desperately poor. I'm trying to keep quiet about my pitifully short length of time here and just nod wisely as they talk about the month they spent in Adelaide or the 6weeks they spent running a hostel on Fraser Island, I'm just soaking it all up. It is further driving the point home to me that I could really take to traveling life though and should seriously consider a more lengthy haul.

One break in our journey was close to sunset when Sally (our tour guide/bus driver) spotted a huge blasted gum tree (burnt out in a bushfire most likely), pulled over and ordered us to gather fire wood, which we did (all extremely nervously cos of snakes and scorpions) and she tied all the wood to the top of the trailer for a fire later.

We eventually stopped at just gone dark at Kings Creek, a roadhouse/bush camp. Sally left the bus open and blasting dodgy dance music while some of the crowd cooked dinner, and some started a fire and sat around chatting. It was all odd stuff like 'are the stars upside down in Australia', and I had a really nice chat with a Hong Kong lass about how crap the Uk is weatherwise, what it was like in Hong Kong when Britain 'gave it back', the tall skyline and how Oz's lowlevel buildings were freaking her out, and how I didn't know what the Queen's birthday was but she did. She keeps a diary in Cantonese and she sits and scribbles it on the road while I sit tapping.

While we were eating our decidedly unauthentic bush tucker (sweet and sour chicken from a big pot) Sally warned us that breakfast time tomorrow was 5am in order to get to see sunrise at Kings Canyon and hike when it was cool. Most people didn't believe her and stayed up drinking but Sally went to bed at 8pm and I followed soon after. Getting up pre dawn is a speciality of mine.

Everyone slept in swags that night apart from one or two 'complete wusses' aka an oldish couple, and a couple who clearly wanted to shag. Swags are a funny old things, they are essentially oilskin sleeping bags inside you tuck a foam mattress, and you sleep in it by getting in your sleeping bag, zipping your self in, and floppping the flap over to keep out the flies. It felt odd sleeping out in the open (what with my British conditioning that it was bound to rain) but it was surprisingly easy actually, and I soon nodded off to the smell of wood smoke and hot dust, and gazing at Orions belt, a little surprised because I didn't expect to see him there in this alien sky...

Should I get cut off, the Uluru tour is due to have me back in Alice on Thu 22nd at 12 noon Alice time. Don't anyone panic til then.

I've just spotted one small reason why I might not want a campervan...it appears that a lot of caravaneers appear to be snotty anal tw*ts. The people in the plot to my left stopped talking and turned and stared at me every time I walked past, and the people in the plot to the right spent two hours that morning washing the exterior of their caravan by hand - and somehow, I got the impression that the did that every morning too.

Another thing I hadn't considered:- Caravaneers in Oz are usually Australian. It figures of course, and if I had any sort of grasp on the nuances of the accent, I'd probably find out that they are all from down south where its cooler, come for our equivelant of a nice camping holiday in the Isle of Wight. That's probably why I stuck out like a sore thumb with my rented camper, my European style red&white tan, and my filthy English ways. At least, I hope that's why they were all sneering at me anyway...

This morning was a brilliantly orchestrated. I had estimated an hour to packed everything up and (as necessary) throw things away and thats how long it took. I'd estimated half an hour to hand the car back and I was bang on. And I'd estimated half an hour for a taxi to the airport and (after check-in) I was about right and had a comfortable half hour to spare in departures to look for a battery charger for my camera (mine doesn't appear to work with this voltage) and a quick VB. Alice has an awkward time difference of half an hour (Half! Why bother!) which is bound to cause confusion. Must keep an eye on that.

The flight was pretty out of the ordinary with that casual walk-yourself-on routine of a small domestic flight. Cairns soon disappeared in the distance and then there was just endless red desert rolling by for the rest of the two hour trip. God it's desolate. I mean, we kid ourselves into thinking the top end of Scotland is desolate but at least you can fly over it and see a road ocassionally. Here? A whole bunch of nothing for hours. Apparently Australia is going through a period of geological atrophy at the moment - there has been no serious seizmic activity in eons and the whole landmass is just sitting there slowly getting weathered to sea level and slowly drying out. You can certainly believe that when you step off the plane in Alice - the heat nearly takes your breath away (and this is Spring!).

Alice Springs at 3pm on a Sunday, what a god forsaken shithole. Everything is shut, there are flies everywhere so you have to practise your Aussie salute every few seconds, and the sun beats down mercilessly, blinding you and sucking the moisture out of everything. Its not like its a big town either, its CBT (central business district) is only a couple of streets and even its local monument Anzacs Hill is small and shabby and covered in grafitti and litter. I pity the poor hapless sods that book a week here, it's like the Douglas High Street/Stockport of Australia, only covered with bleached red dust and sandflies to boot. Awful.

My hotel is very close to the Todd River and I followed the 'river' into 'town' when I went exploring. The Todd River must be a local joke because the large wide riverbed is bone dry and full of sand, though some of the bridges that cross it have 'Road Closed' barriers folded back at their entrances hinting that when the Todd River actually is a river, its a fast deep scary one. Even so there are subtle differences from the Floodways of Daintree (roads that get flooded daily for months on end and nature clearly has the upper hand) to the large storm drain systems of Cairns (catering for ocassional cyclone and tropical shower, but nature is more or less tamed). Here, there are no storm drains or guttering or drains, its like rain is a big surprise for people here and when it happens they kinda just shut their doors and let it wash over the land, perhaps simply letting it slowly soak into the ground and quietly evaporate it again.

Another thing about here is the high Aboriginal presence. They were none existent in Cairns/Port Douglas though you saw a few around Cape Tribulation (perhaps cos the Far North is largely Aboriginal Territory). Here, however, there are loads and I'm perturbed by the whole atmosphere around them. I don't know what I was expecting, perhaps that they all had jobs and cars and nice houses in the suburbs of Alice, or at the very least an Aboriginal 'quarter' like the Chinese quarter in Cairns where they live happily and affluently and have space to do their thing. But no. I'd liken the attitude towards them as similar to the way we react to gypsies in the UK. They tend to hang around in gangs in public areas, always lying about in the sun gently staring into space and swatting flies. Sometimes you see them driving around in beat up vans (and they drive like maniacs) and sometimes you see lone women walking barefoot and pushing shopping bags on wheels, or lone blokes hanging around bottle shops on the blag for booze. As they own parts of the land round here as their ancestral right, I guess mortgages aren't an issue so perhaps 8-4 jobs aren't either, and their sitting around dreamily doing nothing may be just a tribal thing, helped by the fact they don't have to scavenge off the land anymore and therefore have the time to sit and think and eat civilised things like Happy Jack's Burgers. Either way though, their hanging around in gangs is *percieved* as loafing and looking for trouble, and all the white people give them a wide berth unless they are obviously painted up and ready to perform ('go on, *be* aboriginal then!'). Its an odd business being in a land which has been colonised. Then again, so was the UK, numerous times and most European countries had a crack at us. So how come the UK hasn't got the strange oddly displaced people wandering around with their own language and culture and ancient ancestral claim to the land plus a huge grudge? (unless of course you include the Welsh...).

Speaking of ethnic minorities, their are a lot of Harley Davison bikers round here as well. There were bunches of said leather clad beardies hanging around the Mall cafe (singular) and bar (singular), and even a few on top of Anzacs Hill getting their picture taken (and I would have taken a picture too only I was unsure whether they were Hell's Angel's who might take umbridge so I decided not to). There were also loads of chopper riders cruising up and down the highstreet and even as I sit on my balcony now I can here them buzz by - I wonder why there is so many of them? Okay, feasibly piling down the Stuart Highway on the chopper might help them get the whole Easy Rider thing going on, Aussie style, but this is a whole long way from anywhere and I'm sure hours and hours on part dirt roads in baking sun with no shade can't be pleasant really and I wonder why they do it. It's explains the Harley tours to Uluru though - who'd have thought it? Give me the sparkling ocean of the GBR any day.

I couldn't take the heat and the flies so I retreated to my hotel early in the day and sat on my balcony sipping room service wine and eating room service steak. I've got a 6:20 pickup from the hotel tomorrow for the Uluru tour and they don't care about the size of my bag so I don't have to do any of that tedious bag splitting exercise. This means I can just sit here and take it easy and revel in my private bathroom and private shower and warm comfortable bed (because sometime camping can be like banging your head against a wall, and the best bit is actually when you stop...).

Woke up in the middle of the night as usual. Well, to be more honest about it, I woke up at 1am slumped over a local map with a half drunk bottle of lager in my hand (my 6th that evening) and again in the middle of the night, dying for a wee. I quite like wandering around campsites at the middle of the night though. Loads of pale yellow lizards were skittering about eating large exotic looking moths, and I could admire what some people had done with their caravan patch (some look like they had been their years, and the patch next to me was advertising hair cuts for $10!).

I woke up again at 7. I'm learning now that everything wakes up at this time because the sun is already high in the sky by then, and indeed the entire area is tuned to this with opening hours of 8-4 - I should learn to go to bed earlier I guess. I couldn't be bothered to set up the gas stove for a coffee, so instead randomly decided to go to the nearby Port Douglas Wildlife Habitat Centre Experience (tm) just up the road that was not only offering cooked breakfasts, but also serving them in a restaurant in the middle of a huge aviary and completely open to all the wild exotic birds therein. They told the truth too, and I ate most of my egg and bacon with a small white and cream wader standing on the table right in front of my plate, looking like it was about to make a grab for my sausage...it turned out to prefer egg white in the end but I'm not sure it knew what it was eating...

The Wildlife Habitat place turned out to be seriously good as it happened. Aside from two large aviaries where you could get up close and personal with all the tropical birds, there was also a segment where you could walk unfettered with emus and poke them, and an open bit of park with unrestricted access to three flavours of Roo (kanga, wallaby, and swamp wallaby) plus a tiny little rat sized kangeroo thing that goes under a different badge but I can't remember what just now. I tickled the ear of a wallaby, fed a swamp wallaby (and they are adorable, I was very close to shoving one in my rucksack and running out) and circled a kangeroo suspiciously (because they're big buggers and they have a mean look about them). There were only two areas where you couldn't poke the displays and one was the pythons, the other was the Koalas. I guess it sort of figured with the snakes but I wondered about the koala, unless its just that they are too darn cute and also sitting ducks cos they have to sleep all day - at least all the other animals can make a break for it if they want to. Perhaps koalas left open for petting drop dead of stress constantly or something.

Because i had got up so gosh darned early, it was still early when I left the centre. So early, in fact, that pulled off the highway on the way back to Cairns at a random point where the beach alongside seemed suitably pretty, and just sat for a bit soaking up the sun (in the shade underneath a coconut tree) and watching the tide come in. I finally roused myself an hour or so later, and I was still making excellent time.

Next stop (after flicking through some leaflets) was Kuranda. Yes, this was the ultimate destination of the Skyrail I had been on earlier. I hadn't had the time on the last trip to sift through all the tourist shit for anything worthwhile seeing, but now I had an afternoon to kill and had to stay close by Cairns city so this did the job. It turned out to be a worthwhile plan in the end, and I discovered it had a butterfly centre and a crafts market, and I spent a pleasing couple of hours trying to photograph those blue butterflies I saw in the Daintree forest (impossible, the little bastards are blue on the top but brown underneath and everytime I tried to capture them I caught them on an upbeat where you don't see their blueness) and buying shit in the market. It just about made up for the arduous slog to get there - of course for Kuranda to be the end of the line for the Skyrail it's got to be up the top of a ruddy mountain hasn't it? I cursed this fact roundly as I chugged patiently up the hill in 3rd at 40kph with a stream out annoyed tourists behind me. It was a bloody good run on the way back though, once I'd got the old crate moving. I think I got back in half the time actually (and with several small town cars plastered to my front fender like flies). I think I probably should have been a lorry driver and I think I missed my calling. Must treat myself to a HGV license some day.

Anyway, I filled up the juggernaut for the first time just outside of Cairns and pulled up at the campsite steering with one hand, sucking an ice lolly with the other, and chewing gum - a completely different picture to when I first sat in the thing and drove it off in a state of terror. Its all just a matter of getting used to things isn't it? I'm rather sorry I didn't get to try out its 4x4ness though, then again I didn't particularly want to be stranded in Cape Tribulation either and the 4x4ness was only ever intended as an insurance measure. I'll be quite sorry to say goodbye to the old crate though (apart from how underpowered it is on hills). I'm definately going to have to put 'campervan' on my shopping list, along with 'luxury yacht moored on great barrier reef' and 'pet swamp wallaby'.

As I was near Cairns, I didn't linger at the campsite, instead I found some parking at the top of the Esplanade and strolled down it one last time, looking at the Pelicans, savouring the smells of salt marsh, and finding myself accidentally in the Chinese quarter of Cairns (!) and stocking up on cheap knockoff shorts and cover-up shirts - I'm going to postally jetison my coat and jeans at the earliest opportunity, its clear I'm never going to need them.

Now I'm back at camp repacking everything and tidying up ready for handing back The Crate tomorrow and leaving Cairns (boo hoo). The theory is I'm flying over the Alice Springs, and then hooking up with a bus tour to Uluru, and while I reckon Alice will be okay, Uluru will likely as not be devoid of telephonic recievering doowhackys so I may go through another spell of blogophonic blackout. Either that or they've converted the rock into one giant mobile phone mast to cater for all the tourists, its a bit of a lottery really and that's part of the fun.

I'll also be back in hotels again in Alice, oooh that'll be nice. It'll be nice to have a bed *and* floorspace again. I wonder if they'll do my washing for me..? Enough already, must go. I promised myself an early night for once!

Well despite my intention to sleep in, I woke up about 7 and decided to stay awake and get a head start on things.

My mission today:- The Daintree rainforest, or more specifically, the Daintree forest 'experience' (tm) which was an award winning bunch of aerial walkways through the forest that let you view it at a variety of different levels from the top of the canopy to the forest floor. I was in Port Douglas and in theory to get to this place it was just a blast along the Captain Cook Highway and over the Daintree ferry. I strapped down everything that was loose in the camper, shook all the ants out of my gas stove, and set off.

The route between Cairns and Port Douglas is cited as being exceptionally pretty, and indeed I realised this was true when I drove along it yesterday and saw all of those wonderful secluded beaches fringed with rainforest. The route from Port Douglas to Daintree was also meant to be pretty but for different reasons which I wasn't so sure were going to enthrall me as much, namely that it wound it's way through a major sugar producing area of Queensland. I couldn't see how this was going to be even remotely exciting until I started to drive through it. It did manage it though. The vast endless fields of sugar cane growing 6ft+ high on either side of the highway were very impressive, simple for sheer scale (and for the mist covered tropical mountains behind them). Ocassionally you'd get breaks in the cane and a farm/'station' would pop into view, and then it would be walls of cane again.

Another interesting thing was was all along the highway ran a narrow gauge track and I wondered what this was until I started seeing signs for the Cane Railway and finally saw the train itself.

The Cane railway appears to date back to the first plantation settlers. It is a vast network of track that runs between each plantation, and is a steam powered freight train that slowly pulls a long long line of containers from on end to the other, and allows all the farmers (if they call them that here) to dump their cane in said conatiners and have them hauled off for them. Where it comes from, I couldn't tell. Where it goes to, I have no idea. I just knew I was driving for miles through these plantations and most of the time the track was either next to me, or briefly crossing me and taking a detour round another farmstead. The train itself is a no frills rusted old steam engine and it hauls half a mile of containers endlessly on this track, some full of cane, some full of left over bits. Very impressive. I wonder if in the old days all the plantation owners clubbed together to get the railway and shared the costs of running it, or whether it represents the original size of just one plantation owned by one very rich guy? I wonder whether the present day farmers have to pay for the service and how they organise where is stops and where it takes things to? Whatever was going on though, the cane plantations ran all the was the the Daintree River, perhaps with the odd banana or date palm plantation. Then it was like someone flicked a switch from the 'Dry Tropic' to 'Wet Tropic' setting.

Now before I continue I've got to say a thing about australian roads. For a start, the term highway may confuse some into assuming it is some sort of motorway or dual carriageway. I would actually liken the highway to a UK A road, particularly the sort you get on Scotland with no curbs or crash barriers and just a cursory white line to seperate you from the plantation or the trees or the cliff plunging down to the ocean and certain death. Overtaking on the right is not the done thing here, instead you get the odd short patch of additional lane to your left (which looks to my eyes like a lay by) and as a slow moving vehicle the trick is to hug the centre white line, and let all the angry locals whiz past you on the left via the layby. I only learnt this by watching people overtake all the 4X lorries, otherwise I would have been moving over to the left all the time and f*cking up the system.

You could still make good progress on roads like this from Cairns to the Daintree Ferry, but after that it all went wild. Back to this switch flicking, as soon as you got of the ferry (which really WAS being circled by crocs, and had humming birds buzzing aroung it), even though you were still on the highway (because there isn't any other road!) it degenerated to this wierd B road/A road hybrid that cut its way through serious tropical rainforest. By hybrid, I mean that sometimes the road was fine, and then suddenly you'd see a sign for 'Floodway' and this nice straight road would be punctuated by deep ditches where tropical floodwater was clearly meant to flow, and very dodgy looking wooden bridges of creeks full of crocs, and fords with big signs next to them warning of risk of overturning and being washed away. I was lucky in that this was still the dry season but I could now see how easy it might be to get stranded in Daintree during The Wet. The highway twisted and turned away from the river up the mountain and closely hugging the beach (where I learnt my campervans capacity to go up hills was nil, and I couldn't even use momentum because the road was like a slalem course - I certainly learnt its cornering potential though and did a bit of rally car driver style corner cutting). It was absolutely gorgeous with the rainforest to the left and the sea to the right, and a wonderfully challenging piece of road to drive to boot, I was grinning insanely by the end of it and the contents of the camper were strewn everywhere.

The rainforest wasn't particularly hard to get to, what with there being one road and all that, and was just as fabulous as they promised it would be. The critical thing was that this was real forest. It wasn't cordoned off, it wasn't artificially stocked with animals that were tethered to one spot so you could photograph them. No, someone had simply picked a likely spot, then carefully added some walkways at different heights in a way where the forest floor wasn't disturbed, and then charged people to (quietly) walk around it.

A combination of the audio tour (one of those sticks where you dial the number of the commentary you want), the book and the odd informative poster turned out to be really educational, and if you were patient enough to park yourself for a while (as I did on the tree top viewpoint) you could catch glimpses of real live rainforest creatures doing their thing (I mainly saw grean and white wompoo pigeons, brown and yeloow honey eaters, the odd parrot, and lots of striking blue Emperor butterflies the looked like falling bits of tinsel in the canopy clearings). The forest floor was littered with old bits of fruit (vivid blue fruit, lovely) and cassowery droppings, and creepers and tree buttresses - it was great. Singularly failed to find a Cassowary. Wound up spending hours and hours there though, and then walked just up the hill and did their free walkway walk (which was thankfully devoid of people) and put all my new found spotter knowlege in practice (still didn't find a cassowary). Wow!

It was about 3pm when I was finally tired of the place, and after a pause at their eco friendly toilets (basically just a hole on a platform which dropped to the forest floor and was swarming with fruit flies), I decided to head on up to Cape Tribulation and Mt Sorrow (as named by Captain Cook during a gloomy moment) for a looksee.

It was another challenging drive. The highway split away from the coast and carved its was deep into the jungle so all you could see on either side of you was dark menacing rainforest filled with glowing eyes. Weirdly, people actually lived there. At one point the highway was labelled a school route, and I later figured out that all the white sticks at the road side indicated peoples driveways and if you peered down the dirt drive as you went past, you could sometimes glimpse Queeslander houses hidden in a jungle clearing, or sometimes just a shed and a car (bachelor pad). Never figured out where the school actually was or where these people bought food. At Mossman there was a sign that just said 'Last Fuel' and by that I knew they really meant last fuel ever ever so if you planned to drive to the North tip, you were on your own from now on. Hence why my camper has two tanks I guess.

Last stop on the highway was 'Cape Trib'. I didn't like the place personally, all it was was a campsite (from which very loud music and shouting could be heard), a chemist/general store/tourist shop, and a bar full of unfriendly aussies, shouting at some sport. And dodgy looking Indigineous Australians hung around the car park - they appeared to be living out of a beat up old tour bus.

I paused at the shop and chatted with the Californian Pharmacist/Counter Assistant/Dive tour guide and he told me it was perfect weather at the moment and I had been bloody lucky with my live aboard. He had the tired, sweaty look of a British Explorer trapped in some 'bally god forsaken tropical hole' just waiting for the rain to stop so he could get back to Blighty for a nice cup of tea. That further decided me to turn around and go back Port Douglas, though the road was tough and I only just made it back for night fall. I did nearly run over a Cassowary though. I spent hours hunting for the sodding thing in the rainforest and then the bloody thing threw itself in front of me on my way back home. It was too surprised to run and I was too surprised to get my camera, but I look upon it as a good encounter none the less.

Coming back to Port Douglas felt like home though - its by far my favourite spot in the area. Changed campsite though, for a laugh, and ended up in a very posh one that had lizards crawling up the walls of tht toilet block, and lorikeets in the trees, and a strong smell of euclyptus. There were also yellow orioles (I learnt to recognise its very weird and low booming call at the centre)and green parrots.

Todays meal was aussie lamb steaks in cream/lime and fresh mint sauce with a greek salad. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is worthwhile to note that the aussie have no concept of a good greek salad and their olives are pasty, their feta is tasteless. My lamb steaks kicked butt though.

Sat up, drank beer and listened to the crickets that evening. It's pretty idillic though I'm back to waking up all through the night again. I miss the boat :(

Plan for tomorrow? Koala and Butterfly Centre, a bit of beach bumming between Port Douglas and Cairns, and parking up nr Cairns so I can maybe have a nice meal in town in the evening.

Gnight

I'm back on dry land again boo hoo.

The way the trip worked is that it was a seven day trip that was split into two 3 and a half day chunks and you could either do the lot or just one bit of it. I did the first half, and idea was that the boat paused at Lizard Island, the only island for miles with an air strip, and the first half would be flown south back to Cairns and the next half would be flown to Lizard Island (again, scenically I think). The 7 dayers didn't get the nice flight but they got to gloat over how many dives they would do that we would miss. They also got to walk around Lizard Island for a morning whilst all the changovers occured.

Thus, given all this, the Spirit of Freedom was moored at the Island over night and we were all knocked up at the usual 6:45 and expected to have our bags packed and ready to be taken by 7:00am. The crew then went round and took all our luggage over to the island by inflatable while we breakfasted and said goodbyes to one another, and then we all got shipped over to the island by inflatable too. The 7 dayers were taken first to start their hike up the mountain, and the 3 dayers were next and dumped on the beach for a quick 1 hour stroll, followed by a walk to Lizard Island airstrip.

Just before we left, the crew all assembled to say goodbye (including the strange pale ones that got up in the middle of the night to drive to boat overnight from reef to reef) and have a quick photocall. After that we grudgingly had to get on the boat and leave. Liz was very sweet, she collared me just before I got on the inflatable and said I was a very good diver, which must have been meant relatively speaking because I know I am a clutz, a coward, and my air consumption is terrible. In return, I thanked her too for being a really excellent nursemaid, which she was, and I'm feeling a hell of a lot braver now than when I first started which I may not have done with any of the other divers (she was training to be a PADI instructor though which is probably why she was so patient).

We all squeezed onto the boat scuba style (bums on the edge on the brink of rolling off backwards) and one of the crew got off with us and took us on a small turn around the nearby mangrove swamp and hill. It turned out that the island was mainly volcanic and you could pluck volcanic tuff of the ground. There was no source of sweet water on the island so the first settlers all promptly died horrible lingering deaths, but now one of the beaches was an exclusive resort as frequented by Nicolas Cage and Marlon Brando (who caught the third largest every recorded barramundi as well). You could kinda tell the exclusivity by all the expensive yachts that were moored around the place and the two ill humoured men parked at the end of the beach whose sole job appeared to be to politely tell you to turn around and go away. We sat round miilionaire spotting for a while. The crew reconised the yacht of a retired racing car driver who applied for Monaco citizenship recently - a thing that doesn't require VISAS or particular points scores, but instead the act of forwarding $20 million is cash to the Monaco government. The best bit was that the Monaco government reviewed his 'application' and told him he wasn't the kind of person they were looking for, and not to bother asking for the cash back. So he's back fuming on Lizard Island again, hah hah.

Lizard Island International Airport is a shed at the bottom of a 300m landing strip. It doesn't have toilets, but you can watch geckos crawl over the seats as you sit and wait, and weaver birds flit in and out of their nests. Eventually two little Cesnas landed with Skytrans badges (so they were actually part of an official airline!) and emptied out the bunch of people who would be doing the second leg of Spirit's cruise,including the much fabled coach full of japanese tourists - it was going to be a full boat and the 7 dayers had their work cut out for 'em (on our trip we were mostly brits, americans, with the odd european). I noticed they had Mitzu, the japanese instructor to greet them - all part of the service.

Once our luggage had been handled (ie a burly Croc Dundee type had shoved them in holes in the wing with his boot and slammed the lid) our pilot showed us to our seats and went through the safety procedures ('in the event of an emergency, scream loik buggery - it won't help but it moit make yer feel betta') and we took off. The flight was fabulous - we flew at under 500ft all the way and over all the places we had dived. It was so nostalgic and sad! We got a great view of Cairns as we approached too, and landed at some tinpot little hanger miles from the 'proper' airport, though we got a courtesy bus back to our hotels as part of the final goodbye.

I got dumped at a Britz van rental place, just outside of town. Relieved but stunned to find they were perfectly happy with my UK drivers license and obvious air of cluelessness, and as I got a tour of the vehicle I got this slow realisation that I might be out of my depth here. 'It's got two petrol tanks and you can swap between them like this' he said. 'Remeber to lock your wheel nuts before going on dirt road, and unlock 'em again on the highway' he said, and I nodded again, trying to look like an old lag at this. The car has two batteries, three 4x4 gears, and I have to remember that though usually before driving through water you should walk through it first to test it, you should NOT do this in Daintree because the crocs will get you, and they recommened just 'going' fer it' and seeing what happens. Yikes. All I wanted to do was drive to the Koala petting zoo and drive back to Cairns again!

Driving my new camper awakes the same feelings in me that were stirred the first time I drove a transit van, i.e. sitting behing the wheeel I suddenly want to hawk, spit, dangle my arm out the side and shout abuse at passers by, it's just so *butch* (darling). I took it to the Crocodile park near Cairns along the Bruce highway and I was just this huge untoppable jugernaut, liken to one of the many trucks shipping 4X that was on the road with me.

I took the camper for a spin the the nearby Crocodile park first, and went on a very touristy boat trip where the guide dangled chickenheads next to our windows and encouraged crocs to leap up and snap their jaws at our eyeline, followed by a spot of koala petting (perhaps not unsurprisingly, koalas smell very strongly of cough medicine). I also bought a crocodile leather wristband thing studded with croc teeth and had to take a certificate stating that the croc had come from the park, had died happily, and I wasn't a poacher not never ooh no not me mr customs man.

After the croc park, I drove along a truely beautiful road skirting white sanded beaches dotted with black volcanic rock and emeral palms. Finally I ended up in Port Douglas for supplies (milk, bread, kangabangers and lager), and parked myself in a campsite just out of town for the night.

I spent the evening grappling with the gas stove, laundering all my festering clothes (cos I'd only worn 1 pair of shorts and a tshirt during the entire boat trip), and working out how to assemble the bed (an exercise, as with all camping, of extreme organisation and flexibility in confined spaces). Then I finished up the night with 2inch thick kanga steaks in a bun, lots of beer, and a couple of mossie bites. Fantastic! And what do I have to look forward to tomorrow? Daintree rainforest here I come! (no crocs though, I promise).