We arrived in Western Australia, over five months ago and have travelled (mostly) east though an awful lot of the country: up and across Western Australia, following the Eyre Highway across the Nullarbor; South Australia during the Tour Down Under; sweeping along the Great Ocean Road in Victoria; doffing our caps to the Parliament Building […]

Fed up with tents and hostels, we decided that for our 10 day visit to Brisbane we’d look for a nicer place to stay. Happily, a lovely lady named Kate offered us a room in her Queensland cottage just a few kilometres from the city centre. Since selling the car when we first arrived, we’ve […]

Moments after stepping out of the shark tank, my phone rang: “It’s Paula, we’re in Brisbane already. Where are you?” A couple of days ago I had posted a handful of adverts on the internet to begin the sale our glorious and trustworthy car, Don. I had fielded a number of calls from interested parties […]

You’ll recall that a few days ago, we were way up in Airlie Beach and heading further north towards the scuba dive site of the SS Yongala shipwreck. Unfortunately, the forecast bad weather forced us to cancel our dive and so we turned on our heels and headed back towards Brisbane. Disappointed that our last […]

In this post, I was looking forward to extolling the virtues of scuba diving the SS Yongala shipwreck, billed as “one of the world’s top ten dive sites” (curiously, we’ve already dived fifteen of the world’s top ten…) but I’m sad to report that I can’t: the forecast adverse weather conditions forced the diving company […]

Can you believe it? Claire & I recently celebrated our fourth anniversary together. Even more amazing is the fact that we’ve now been travelling together, in each other’s company 24×7, for longer than we actually lived with each other in London — and we’re still on speaking terms! My mother warned me that, with Claire, […]

After a splendid day spent sailing around the Whitsundays yesterday, Dave and I were looking forward to going beyond the islands to the Great Barrier Reef proper. Our chosen vessel, Seaflight, would take us on a three hour journey across the shipping channel to Knuckle Reef, 95km offshore and part of the main GBR. After […]

Unlike chartering your own yacht in New Zealand’s Bay of Islands, sailing yourself around the Whitsunday Islands in Queensland is prohibitively expensive and so we opted to join a tour on a monster-big catamaran. A 26 metre (85 feet) lilac-purple one at that! Those who know me well know that I’m not a great sailor […]

Ever since I first visited Florida as a child, the image of palm trees always stirs my memories of exotic holidays and far away places. I love tropical holidays and couldn’t wait to see my first line of palms in Queensland, signalling I had arrived somewhere that was likely to have sun, sea and snorkelling. […]

Like “The Artist Formerly Known As… “, 1770 also causes a fair amount of confusion. In fact, apart from Ray and Gillian in Hervey Bay, I bet that you haven’t got the foggiest idea what I’m talking about…? 1770, sometimes written as ‘Seventeen Seventy”, is actually the name of a town. Not just any town […]