We’re travelling up the eastern coast of Australia, heading about as far as the Whitsunday Islands before turning around and returning to Brisbane (which we’ve already bypassed) to sell the car and catch onward flights. The Australian weather hasn’t been particularly kind to us at any stage really: it’s either been way too hot, or way too wet to enjoy the stereotypical outdoorsy local activities. As we travelled up the easy coast, we’ve found ourselves skipping some of the places that should have been highlights of our tour. The campsites at Byron Bay over the Easter weekend were full and the weather was dismal, so we drove on to Surfer’s Paradise which we didn’t see either, again because of the heavy rains.

We’ve bypassed Brisbane because we’ll likely return there to sell Don, our car, and fly out of the country. From speaking to the local tourist information yesterday, we’ve learnt that the eastern beaches of Fraser Island are closed to to “treacherous conditions” which is a big shame because these “sand highways” are the most famous bits of the island! The view is that they might reopen on Friday, so we’ll probably hang around to see how the situation develops.

The Whitsunday Islands and the Great Barrier Reef should still provide some decent sailing and Scuba diving, so we’ll still head up that way, but probably won’t go much further. Local advice and our guide book suggests that, as we’re driving the coast instead of the more usual method of flying, Cairns won’t be worth the effort. Port Douglas (north of Cairns) would be a nice stop, but in the heavy rain, is there much point? Hopefully, as we return south to Brisbane, the weather might have cleared enough for us to stop in all the picturesque bays that were flooded on the way up.

The Credit Crunch has helped itself to the value of my half my life’s savings and so it’s befitting that we’re almost exactly half way around the world before my bank balance is starting to indicate that it’s time to start thinking about coming home. Without personal experience the following might be difficult to believe, but even travelling and sightseeing can become monotonous if one does it long enough!

We’re lucky to have a small number of friends and acquaintances dotted around Australia. In addition to the obvious boost of spending time with familiar faces, we get really excited about the prospect of spending a night or two in a bed — we’ve been camping for over five months now and have easily slept six out of seven nights in a tent or the back of a car! I feel like we really deserve a bed again and, of course, a healthy dose of homesickness doesn’t help our appetite for continued travel either!

We were planning to journey east to South America and spend a few months in one of the final travel frontiers, but that would be a mistake for us right now. Much better to return to the world of family, friends, lounges, bedrooms and–dare I say–work, before taking on the last continent. Half of me already knows that, after a few weeks/months, of catching-up with family and friends in the UK, I’ll be sick of the weather and, the doom and gloom in the media, the high cost of living, the now-obvious societal Affluenza, the traffic jams and the overcrowded/overpriced housing (I’m writing this post from the dining table in an enormous, new-build Aussie house which sits on half an acre of land and cost less than our pokey-ish London flat). But that half of me will have to grin and bear the return to the UK before shouting “I told you so”. Assuming that we continue with our newly decided travel plans (below), by the time we touch down in the UK it will have been over twenty-two months–nearly two years–since we began our trip. It hit home when Claire’s best friend, Naomi, recently told her over the phone: “You’ve been away ages. Since you left, I’ve been travelling for a year, got engaged, moved house, bought a car and got a new job!” In fact we’ll only just about be making it home in time for her wedding, which is in Canada (so we obviously already have another mini-travel planned…).

After quite a lot of deliberation, here’s the new plan:

After selling the car in Brisbane, we’ll fly to Raratonga in the Cook Islands and spend up to a week chilling out and doing a bit of snorkelling. We don’t plan to do much sightseeing there, rather will just rest, relax and review our last two years: what we liked, what we didn’t, what we’ve learnt, what we will and won’t say when we get back home — there’s nothing worse than a travel bore after all!

From the Cook Islands, we’ll continue flying east and change planes in LA, but only so that I can legitimately claim that I’ve circumnavigated the globe! Mwahaha! World domination will be mine (in a way).