At time of writing, we’re over seventeen months into our travels and, having cooled-off from India in Singapore and Malaysia, are just about ready to undertake another big overground journey. This time, we’re planning to buy a car — hopefully a big one too. Maybe even a Toyota Land Cruiser like the one in which we were driven around the northern Tanzania Safari circuit.

We’ve arrived in Perth, on the west coast, and will hang around for a couple of weeks to celebrate Christmas and see in the New Year. If the car-thing works out, in early January we’ll wave civilisation goodbye and hug the coast north to Exmouth to dive Ningaloo Reef — which many guidebooks rate as more impressive than the Great Barrier Reef. From there, we’ll head inland into the outback and in a southerly direction to visit the gold rush mining town of Kalgoorlie. Further south we’ll drive the Nullarbor Plain, which roughly translated means “no trees”. Crossing the 1,350km Nullarbor by car is considered the ultimate outback roadtrip and should be a good test of our endurance. We’ll hop onto the Great Ocean Road to Adelaide, for some awesome coastal roads with accompanying views. The total distance from Perth to Adelaide is 2,700km, so the journey will probably take us the best part of a morning… From Adelaide, we’ll likely curve it around to Sydney, via Melbourne. If we’ve enough energy reserves left (not to mention days on our visa), we’ll climb north to Cairns for more diving in the Great Barrier Reef. I’ve not yet managed to squeeze in a divertion to Uluru (Ayers Rock) on the itinerary, but am certain that we’ll pay a visit even if it is a fly-in/fly-out job — it really is in the middle of nowhere! Oh and, we want to skip over to Tasmania too. Is that asking a bit much?

Make no mistake that this is a big road trip. I reckon that we’ll cover 10-15,000km in three months or less. We’ll be moving fast. Choice of vehicle will be an important one: in some places in the outback, we’re told that days can pass before seeing another car. Our criteria will be reliability, parts availability/servicability, air-conditioning and resalability — in that order. And we want to buy it for a credit-crunch-busting AUD$4000 (under £2000) or less, which is quite a big ask!

We’ve shared our plans with the locals and and the common responses include:

• The heat up north is unbearable, easily topping 40 degrees.
• The persistent flies up north are unbearable (we’ve bought fly nets to hang over our hats).
• The distances and desolation are much greater than we think — our drive through the uninhabited Skeleton Coast in Namibia will have been useful practice.
• The outback effortlessly fries cars. We must check the cooling system often.
• We’re quite mad to attempt such a journey at all. Even more so at this time of year.