[NB this page best viewed in full screen mode as some stuff may slip of the edge of the picture: Press F11 and use up and down keys to view. F11 again will return you to normal screen mode.] If any photos do not appear then try right-clicking on the gap and selecting "Show Picture". I also should point out that there are no photos for the first part as my camera was broken until the 8th Jan.

The sadness at leaving New Zealand after just 3 weeks was soon tempered by a growing excitement at my return to Melbourne. For those that don't know, I lived in Melbourne from 1989 - 1991 (aged 12 - 14) and went to school there for the first year. I absolutley loved my time out there [and even sported an Aussie accent back then!].

Owing to popularity of flights at that time of year we had ended up flying late evening on Christmas Eve. As far as we could tell, we were the only flight out of Christchurch airport that evening and the place was totally dead with all the shops shut. However, these airport people can spot an alcoholic like me from a large distance and it only took a small mention to a steward before they opened up the duty free just for us. Awesome Kiwi service again. We obliged with several purchases.

The flight was delayed slightly, but this had the wonderful effect of transferring the flight to straddle the 24th / 25th midnight. Throw a couple of time changes and our westerly direction of travel into the pot and you have the wonderful result that we saw Christmas in twice. What's that phrase about all your Christmases?...

Anyway, down we touched in Melbourne at about 00:40 on Christmas Day and memories came flooding back immediately. Yes, Australia has got to be the only place in the world where the first thing you have to do on arrival is send your shoes away to be washed. The temptation to point out to the customs guys that whilst their washing was good, the polishing and drying left a little to be desired, was tempered by the Bolivian-sized firearm carried by the airport police.

In another act of exceptional hospitality, an old schoolmate of mine (whom I had not seen for 11 years!) had not only agreed to put us up for the period, but also pick us up from the airport [I believe the alternative of midnight mass with the family may have helped sway that one]. I would like to say that the trip back from Tullamarine airport was down memory lane, but since I lived in Melbourne they have completely upgraded the motorway system and one now travels straight under town in a network of tunnels to get to the eastern suburbs. It now being about 4am NZ time, we went straight to bed.

The combination of me and Melbourne was never likely to precipitate much sun, and indeed a fair bit of precipitation was seen [apologies for cheap play on words] on Christmas Day itself. However, given that we were having a traditional turkey roast, then the only appropriate weather was of the English variety so actually I was totally happy, and we were still able to have pre-lunch drinks outside in some watery sun. [for those that don't know, Melbourne is world famous for its four-seasons-in-one-day weather patterns].

The Wallises (our excellent hosts) had bravely undertaken to feed 20 of their extended family so we all had a great time, which was awesome and certainly preferable to sitting miserably in a hostel with fellow exiles as had seemed likely to be the case. Much food was eaten, much wine was drunk and I introduced the concept of brandy butter to some Australians, thugh none of them quite seemed to match my legendary fondness for the stuff. Come on, how can you possibly beat something that combines the Holy Trinity of sugar, fat and alcohol?

Boxing Day dawned cool but sunny. This was both good and bad. Good because we were heading to the cricket and so we'd get play; bad because we were heading to the cricket and so England would not be saved by rain. We'd not booked tickets as the Melbourne Cricket Ground [MCG] can seat 100,000 people but discoveed that one of the stands was out of action reducing capacity significantly. However, we turned up just early enough to buy them on the door and settled in with 69,998 other people for the Test, or more correctly as we're in Australia, the "Fourth Orange Ashes Test series supported also by Sakata - 'The Rice Snack', Gatorade - 'scientifically proven to increase athletic performance' and Milo - 'Crack one through the covers'.".

I appreciate (even if I do not comprehend) that some of you are not enormous fans cricket and so, for the enlightened ones, full description of the Test can be found here. Aren't I considerate.

Not wishing to be further depressed about our national sporting incompetence (snooker, darts and rowing [hurrah!] apart) the next few days were spent exploring Melbourne and the nearby area. Highlights included a visit to Healesville animal sanctuary where we saw many of the weird and wonderful native Aussie flora and fauna; a visit to one of the many Yarra valley wineries; and my first ever attempt at rollerblading. This last event was notable first for me wiping out on exiting the hire shop, and second for the unfortunate asymmetry in working out how to accelerate well before working out how to decelerate. However, I discovered that the "grab hold of a lamp post and spin around it until you come to a stop" can be a very effective, if rather unstylish method.

I also couldn't resist a brief trip round my old school (sadly totaly redeveloped since I was there) and to my old street (completely unchanged and just how I remember it, right down to the old fire hydrant that used to double as stumps in our street cricket games!). Here, I was able to have a nice meal with my ex-nextdoor neighbours who are still in the same house. I almost felt like it was 1991 again.

After the end of the 5th day's cricket we had our bus to Sydney. For us inhabitants of small countries, Sydney appears to be just around the corner from Melbourne. It is not. Certainly not in European terms and involves an 11 hour overnight bus journey which cruises into Sydney at 7am. It was now New Year's Eve and we had a small problem to overcome: lack of accommodation. We had thought we were being organised in phoning every place in the guidebook to book ahead a full month earlier but all had been booked out. Our only available strategy was to try the first-come-first-served places and hope. After trying all 30 or so establishments in the insalubrious Kings Cross region we found ourselves on a waiting list and starting to size up the local park benches.

Fortunately one person checked out of the hostel and so things had improved very marginally to the point where we could at least sleep in shifts, which after the overnight bus, we proceeded to do so, and remarkably, someone else checked out in the afternoon leaving us with a bed each.

Now I can think of many worse places to spend New Year than Sydney and to cap it all, my grandparents had managed to get us an invite to a highly distant relation's New Year's Eve party. What's more, said party was in Kirribilli, a mere 5 min walk from premier views of the bridge fireworks. Traditionally, there are sets of fireworks at 9pm and midnight but I managed to get the first lot cancelled by bringing high winds along and things looked bad for midnight. Fortunately, God got bored with hounding me with English weather at about 11pm and so the fireworks took place and jolly good they were too. I imagine many of you saw them on the news - they're even better in first person.

The rest of the evening becomes typically patchy in my memory but I do remember an ambitious attempt to walk back from Kirribilli to King's Cross which took a sobering 2 hours.

New Year's Day itself saw the customary all day long rain which did not bode well for the cricket the next day to which we had pre-reserved tickets. However, the 2nd turned out to be warm and sunny and we headed down to the SCG buoyed by the knowledge that England (now 4-0 down in a 5 match series) are usually at their best when you least expect it and when the pressure's off.

In contrast to the enormous and gladiatorial feel to the MCG, the SCG has a sense of history and is definitely more picturesque, though it only holds around 48,000. With the Aussies confident of enjoying a 5-0 series demolition, and an enormous English contingent in town, the first 3 days were unprecedently sold out. Luckily, through my extended cricket fan network I had access to tickets for all days if the match was to prove exciting. It proved so. Again I shall not bore the infidels with the details which can be found here, although I've done my best to include plenty of non-cricket amusements such as the magnificent Barmy Army.

Now that the only proper reason of visiting Sydney had passed it was time to do the minor attractions such as the opera house, the bridge, the harbour and the zoo.

Boring but necessary shot of Opera House. Impressively forward thinking for the 50's

And a shot of the city centre with that ubiquitous white thing again as taken from the commuter ferry. The shiny building directly above the bow of the big ferry is the one used in that rather cool Matrix helicopter scene.

And the bridge gets to rear it's not inconsiderably sized head as well.

These sights are all clearly visible from all over the harbour area and are undeniably impressive. What is even more galling to us Londoners is that this is the background many people see on their daily commute to work. Now here comes a tough choice: "Opera house, Harbour and bridge" or "dirty Underground tunnel". It's a tough one, but the very real opportunity of seeing an enormous live (in both senses of the word) rat scurrying on the tracks gives the Tube a narrow win for me.

Anyway, these photos were taken from the ferry to Tooronga zoo where we went to see some more Aussie creature plus the usual large game that can be found in any decent zoo. The difference here is that very few giraffes and elephants get to live on a hill overlooking a harbour like Sydney's

I bet they'd rather have an acacia tree and a patch of savannah but the tourists are happier.

Sydney, now being the primary city in the Australasian region, is a pretty intense and busy place, which does not always find favour with me for extended periods. However, just 2 hours away on the train are the Blue Mountains, so called for the haze effect created by the eponymous native eucalyptus. These trees can grow pretty tall and though they don't often exceed 100m, the largest tree ever known was one of these, coming in at over 400 foot (same as a 35 storey building) before some idiot convict cut it down.

The region is characterized by some steep cliffs, ridges and gullies and it took a long time to be fully explored. Thankfully, when they did they decided it was rather nice and so set it aside for a National Park, where much of it remains untouched. In fact, a beautiful exemplar of how untouched it is the story of the Wollemi Pines. One day in 1994 some intrepid abseilers, searching for a perfect waterfall/river system to fool around in, stumbled into an inaccessible gorge where they saw some odd looking trees. I imagine that this would not particularly interest the average abseiler but one of them must have been an amateur botanist or something because further invesigation revealed that they were in fact the sole survivors of an entire type of plant previously believed to have been extinct for 60,000,000 years. After the great and good of the botanical world had confirmed this fact the abseilers were sworn to secrecy and the exact location of these "dinosaur-trees" was made a secret known only to a few. Indeed, the film and photos you can see of these trees were taken by a team helicoptered in blind-folded. Samples taken have allowed further study to occur in labs and so the exact location is known only to the few abseilers, a scientist or two and (presumably) a helicopter pilot.

Unfortunately the blue colour does not come out too well but if you adjust your monitor a bit you'll get the effect. The weird black lines result from this being 2 photos glued together.

These 3 columns are known as the Three Sisters and are perhaps the most famous landmark in the region.

No trip to Sydney is complete without a trip to the famous Bondi Beach, where there is a fantasticly beautiful walk that takes you past several other (less crowded) beaches all the way to Coogee Beach. The Pacific pounds away mercilessly at either the white sand or the sandstone cliffs that divide the beaches creating a fine white surf to complement the blues of the sky and water and yellows of sand and rock.

The cliff and surf partway between Bondi and Coogee.

The Sydney weather was being mainly sunny although we had a few cloudy days. Unfortunately, one such day was when I had booked myself in to do the world-famous Bridge Climb which had been a totally unexpected but very generous leaving gift for me from my Putney friends. This actually turned out to be a blessing in disguise for one does the climb in a polyester grey jump suit (so as to blend into the bridge when viewed from afar) and it would have been pretty unpleasant in 35 degree sunshine.

Needless to say the view from the top of the bridge is pretty much the finest one of Sydney that non-flying creatures can get and the climb is fairly exciting as well with a few sheer drops proliferating! The only downside is that one is not allowed to take one's own camera so the photos I have are in the old fashioned format and those of you keen to see them will have to wait for my return.

The final important thing to do whilst in the region was clearly to go to Donald Bradman's home town, Bowral, which I was able to do whilst having a good Aussie barbie with more extended family. [For the ignorant: take the record and reputation of Tiger Woods in golf, Wayne Gretsky in ice hockey, Pele in football, or Wilt Chamberlain in basketball then treble the gap from them to the next player a few times. You might now have the margin by which Bradman was the best ever cricket player].

This concluded the Sydney region and also, perhaps concluded my previous style of travel for I had now booked myself onto the Oz Experience and the pace and style of life was about to take a distinct change. The Oz Experience is a hop-on hop-off bus service that runs (amongst other routes) up from Sydney to Cairns. It is totally aimed at the young backpacker crowd and takes you to other places on top of the main towns, provides ample opportunity to do action/adventure stuff and generally revolves around lots of serious partying.

50 or so of us thus boarded the Big Green Bus and headed up north. The atmosphere is much friendlier than a regular bus and with the driver encouraging silly games as well as providing the commentary even I found I was meeting people quickly. Nearly everyone does the first 3 (of 9) stages in one continuous trek which means that you quickly get a sense of "our group", which, certainly for me, never faded. Everyone is on different timetables later on but fairly soon it seems that one finds oneself with people of similar timeframe and so sub-groups appear. However, one of the best things is that when arriving in the next stop it is almost certain that people you already know will be there and vice versa whenever a new bus comes in to somewhere you already are.

The first 3 days saw (amongst other things) visits to a sheep station, a brilliantly backwater country town and some horse-riding (yes, I was seen on a horse!) in a river that was running surprisingly violently for an area that had seen no rain in 14 months. This point was really rammed home when we stopped for lunch at a reservoir one day that was clearly only about 25% full. It being a fairly warm day, I floated the idea of swimming across said reservoir and back and a couple of people joined me. As is often the case with my ideas, what looked relatively simple was in fact not very simple, but the water was warm and there weren't any crocodiles around. Of far more consequence than crocodiles was the discovery when halfway across as to the reason why the river was flowing so rapidly; yes, they'd opened the dam for irrigation purposes. Luckily, we were able to walk upstream from the dam before swimming back across but, like fools, it had not occurred to any of us to check for any currents!

Just a quick paddle! You can see the normal waterline from where the trees on the far bank end.

The first place we arrived at where we would be spending some time was the famous party town of Byron Bay. Owing to the frenzy we had been whipped into by our driver (or was it the large quantities of cheap sparkling passion fruit wine?) we arrived in exceptionally high spirits.

The party bus is coming to town

It was pretty late by the time we made it so no time was wasted before hitting the spectacularly cheesy bar known as Cheeky Monkeys. Here we were introduced to the Aussie backpacker tradition of table-dancing. Yes, no cheesy backpacker place is compelete without some sturdy tables and benches on which to give it some to the usual variety of classics and chart house. The following photo might start to give you an impression of the place. Sophisticated it was not - and I loved it.

First night in Cheeky's. For "stages" in the sign on the right read "tables"

Anyway, Cheeky's was destined to become the standard place to finish the night from midnight onwards. Even a reluctant (at the best of times) bopper like myself ended up spending many consecutive hours jumping up and down (the word dancing would be metaphorical in the extreme) on the tables to the wonderfully identical playlist that was churned out each night. This included all the classics such as "livin' on a prayer", "summer of '69", "sandstorm", "500 miles", "can't get you out of my head", "I come from a land down under" etc.

Alas, a few of us had booked ourselves onto a scuba diving course starting a couple of days after our arrival and we were told that we couldn't go out and drink the night away before diving the next day. So we had to stop. Yeah, right. Even the 6:30 starts rarely got us back before 3.

A typical start to the evening. Drinking Games.

Celebrating the end of the diving course (the round hand signal means OK underwater). I should like to point out that I have had precisely no alcohol at all this evening. Honest. I also have many photos taken considerably later on this same evening which you'll have to bribe me to show you...

The scuba diving was absolutely awesome. It is a wonderful feeling to be able to breathe underwater and perhaps the best thing about it is that you adjust yourself to neither sink nor float thus opening the option of 3D travel - up and down, as well as forwards, backwards, left and right. A bit like flying. This would obviously (well for me it was) be entertaining enough but Byron Bay has some rocks 3km offshore that attract loads of marine life. Within our first 2 dives we had seen turtles, giant blue groper, moray eels, sting rays, eagle rays, sharks(!) - of the harmless but excellently named Wobbygong variety - and lots of brightly coloured smaller tropical fish.

Brightly coloured little fish

Here comes trouble...

Oh, no! I've lost my air! And what a sexy pink mask that is.

A loggerhead turtle

There wasn't a great deal more to report from Byron Bay other than that it has a lovely strip of golden sand with some moderately decent waves coming in, on which we spent the day time after the diving course was over. It also has a very bright lighthouse on what is apparently the most easterly point in Australia.

The beach in the early evening

The Byron Lighthouse, which (for trivia buffs) produces the brightest light in the southern hemisphere. Bet you're pleased I told you that.

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