Driving fatigue is an insidious beast. You can drive attentively and carefully for hours at a stretch (my record is currently five), and then suddenly your spatial awareness goes to hell, your overtaking manoeuvres become erratic and dangerous, and you find yourself flicking two fingers up at anyone fool enough to tangle with your lane. We needed to stop.

Problem was, it was Sunday. Rockhampton was closed. The shopping mall, the supermarket, the little shops – with the unhelpful exception of an antique shop – were all closed for the day.

We passed entirely through the town, which was melting in the heat, until we found a Subway hidden away behind a warehouse off the highway.

“Nah, I don’t think Rockie’ll ever have Sunday trading,” said the woman behind the counter. We remarked we’d had a hard time finding somewhere to eat until we’d spied the Subway.

“Lucky us,” she said, a little hotly.

Things improved slightly when we found the cinema – which was open – and settled down to a bag of sweets. Things took an urgent and permanent dive for the worse when, halfway through the bag, my mouth filled with gravel and one of my molars, which had been giving me trouble for months, announced its presence with a searing blast of pain. A little investigation revealed the worst: my filling had disintegrated. Even Will Farrell teabagging a drumkit couldn’t take my mind off the fact that, come Monday, I was going to have to face a dentist.

I was miserable by the time we came out of the cinema. I was tired and aching from driving, my mouth had spontaneously gone to hell, and we didn’t have a campsite. When we did find a campsite we bickered pointlessly over where to camp (can someone please back me up that camping under powerlines is bad for you?), then went to bed with a handful of dentists’ numbers and a vague sense of unhappiness.

The next day improved slightly. The local hospital would only take us if we were registered unemployed or elderly, and the first dentist was full, but we wangled an emergency appointment on our third go. I brushed carefully.

The dentist peered curiously into my mouth.

“You do know you’ve got another hole?” she asked. There was a pause. She gasped: “Two holes! What have you been eating?”

“Bags of sugar, mostly,” I joked.

She gasped in mock horror. “And you dare say this to a dentist?”

I liked her from the start. We agreed to do a proper job on the molar, and temporary fills on the two partial holes, on the condition that I get them fixed when we reach London. Root canal was threatened if the filling didn’t work. To say I was nervous would be to understate things somewhat.

Since our myriad travel immunisations I’m not so squeamish about needles, but even so, the two mouth-numbing injections before we got started were unpleasant. It’s not just the impact of a sharp, dry needle coming into contact with my soft gums, but the lingering, irrational concern that I’ll reflexively clamp down, chomp the needle in two, and twirl shrieking into the waiting room, spraying blood, saliva and novocaine over the horrified assembly of waiting patients.

In the event there was a great deal of drilling and excavation, a little bit of pain, and an hour later I emerged blinking into the sunlight. In addition to three new fillings I also appeared to have a camping sock for a tongue and someone else’s teeth.

“Can you sort out the bill, please, darling?” I said.

Actually, I said “Ca yoo sthorchow th bee, blith barling?” I also seemed to have had a serious stroke while I was under the drill, and for the next few hours I was miserably mute, nodding, shaking my head, or gesturing helplessly whenever someone asked me a question. The next time you need to say something, I’d like you to pause and appreciate the fact that you can speak intelligibly without straining yourself or pouring a river of dribble all over your shoes.

Since I couldn’t talk, and it didn’t seem like much fun to sit for the rest of the day with a sore mouth in a hot tent, we drove. We drove for a long time, in fact. We left at around two in the afternoon, and we arrived in Airlie beach around eight in the evening. By that time my mouth had recovered feeling, and I was using my new-found powers of speech to unhappily recount my time in The Chair and to lament my painful gums. On the plus side, my molar was now merely sensitive to hot and cold, which was an improvement to the searing pain I’d been occasionally enduring whenever I ate.

The next day, I resolved, would be better. We were virtually at the Whitsundays, a collection of islands anchored to the Great Barrier Reef. Ahead: snorkelling, boat trips and absolutely no drills.

Dave uses mouthwash now. The total damage, by the way, was A$265 for three fillings, lots of painkiller and an X-Ray.

Which was full, so we drove another forty kilometres to another site. Since we left Byron Bay we’d done three hundred kilometres and were exhausted. Still, it was good to be near a city – Brisbane sat about half an hour down the road, and we spent the evening browsing a shopping mall and watching Wall-E. Which was great, by the way.

The next day we decamped and headed in heavy traffic to Fraser Island. Fraser Island is the largest sand island in the world: 1,800 astonishingly lush square kilometres of sand dunes, formed over two million years.

First, we needed wheels. Wombat, our rented Toyota Yaris, was proving remarkably frugal, but the only vehicles allowed on the island are four-wheel drive.

We spent forever looking for a tour that would take us. Our arrival coincided with unfortunate perfection with the Australian school holidays, which meant the tours were full and the four by fours were gone. Even the group hires, in which you’re grouped with six other backpackers and sent off in a troop carrier, were full.

In a way it was a happy co-incidence. I couldn’t (still can’t, actually) think of much worse than being at the wheel of a four-ton truck with six people shouting instructions and encouragement.

Eventually we spotted a collection of rugged-looking trucks by the side of the road and popped our heads in. At the counter stood a lavishly-tattooed man in a baseball cap.

“What’s the smallest four by four you have?” I asked.

“A Wrangler.”

My heart soared. I want a Jeep Wranger. I think they are approximately the best-looking small four by four on the planet, and even better, they’re not the Suzuki Jimny.

Most four by four rental companies around Fraser Island offer Jimnys as their smallest option. I drove one in Indonesia and it may have been the worst car I’ve ever driven, including the Citroen AX I learnt to drive in, which was made chiefly of Airfix-grade plastic and had no engine.

Hell, the Suzuki Jimny may be the worst car ever made. A Wrangler for two days would be heaven.

“But that’s out,” he continued. “I’ll do you the Hilux for the same price.”

Bummer. Still, the Toyota Hilux is a legend. Remember that episode of Top Gear where they make a concerted effort to kill one?

I glanced out the window. A row of gleaming Hiluxes sat outside, their wheel arches towering above their chunky tyres. Want one? Yes, please.

Still, it was terrifying. Rental cars almost always are. The insurance excess on Wombat was A$3,000, which, on a 1.3 litre two-door compact, covers just about anything you can do to it. The insurance excess on the Hilux would be A$1,500, which wouldn’t be so bad except that off-road that kind of damage could be done in a heartbeat.

Worse still, that insurance excess only applied in a two-car collision. “If you punch into a tree,” said our tattooed man, “there’s no excess.” Our bill, effectively, was limited only by the value of a new car.

On the desk in front of him was a picture of a Hilux. Its roof had caved in and its windscreen was smashed. Underneath was written: “25 minutes. $40,000.”

It was worrying stuff. I pointed at the picture. “Is that a record?”

“Aw, yeah. That was a group of students on holiday. Five minutes before that I was getting calls from friends saying they were driving like clowns. They rolled it over and got billed for the whole lot.”

There was another photo, this time of the front bumper of a Hilux. The bumper was spotted with innocuous-looking bits of minor damage, with some truly startling figures written next to them. A crack in the bumper would set us back more than A$1,000. A cracked headlight (easily done if a hot lamp dips into cold water, apparently) was a three-figure bill.

“All these,” he gestured at the expansive range of photos and bits of broken truck, “were the result of people going too fast. 96 per cent of people return the vehicle with a full fuel tank of petrol and we all get on with our lives.”

The worry increased to near-panic. We nervously signed the rental form and waiver and agreed to come back the next morning.

The next day, hyperventilating at the prospect of having to buy a ruined truck, we came back. Our A$155 a day rental included a five minute in-car training session, and the truck was ready for idiots. You could shift into four-wheel drive while moving, it was automatic, and the tyres were pre-deflated for better grip on the loose sand we’d find on the island.

We rolled off the ferry on the island with a few other cars, which promptly roared off and left us nervously purring across the sand. Fraser Island’s eastern beach is paradise. We drove along firm, tightly-packed sand with the ocean roaring to our right and the horizon clear. Every now and then we’d thump through a freshwater creek, and I tried to ignore the sticker on the inside of the windscreen that said “No insurance for immersion.”

We’d been on the island for all of three hours when we got stuck for the first time. Coming on and off the beaches is a four-wheel job. The sand is churned up by the 350,000 people who visit Fraser Island each year, and as a result is dry, loose, and extremely deep. An instant crowd of concerned-looking Australians gathered. If we were stuck, it at least looked like there would be no shortage of offers to pull us clear. A man came up while I frustratedly tried to rock our Hilux (nicknamed Shirley, by the way) free.

“You need to deflate your tyres a bit more. What are they at at the moment?”

My inner caveman winced. I had no idea. Did we even have a tyre gauge?

“Say, 22 PSI. When you get free stop on the wet sand and have a look. Have fun.”

I loved him for that last bit. We eventually rocked ourselves free and made our way to our inland campsite.

The real reason for visiting Fraser Island – except for larking about in a four wheel drive, which I suppose is good enough in itself – is to visit its inland lakes. We were on our way to Lake Birrabeen when we came across a traffic jam stretching up a particularly unpleasant-looking hill.

“Bloody backpackers got stuck, as usual,” growled a man from a Mitsubishi. “They were going to the lake, then decided they were going to miss their barge to the mainland. They want us all to back up around the corner so they can get past.” He sniffed irritatedly. “Only wanted to take the kids for an afternoon swim.”

The backpackers were having trouble. They were in a Land Rover and, and continually dug the wheels into the ground, creating foot-deep potholes in the track. Eventually, with much reversing and shunting around, they were past. The other cars moved on, and we promptly found ourselves struggling to get over the craters left by the Land Rover. Every time we moved forwards one of the wheels would sink into the ground, leaving us to reverse out of the hole to try again, with identical results.

Presently, a man, who had been watching patiently, came up. “May I make a suggestion?” he asked. “It’s all about momentum. You don’t have any grip at the front, so…” he made a thrusting motion with his fist.

We backed down to the bottom of the hill, and steeling ourselves, fired our forty thousand dollar truck towards the top of the hill. The wheels bit the sand, the suspension banged alarmingly, and anything not bolted to the floor flew towards the ceiling. We weren’t strapped into the car, we were strapped down. We flew over the crest and thumped down on the other side. It really was all about momentum. From there on, we were set. Large hills required plenty of power, four wheel drive, and a kind of blind hope that there wasn’t something large at the top of the hill coming the other way. We also had success revving the engine at the first hint of getting bogged down in sand, and before long we were motoring up sandy hills in two wheel drive. If things slowed down towards the top we began to bellow: “I believe!” as the engine revved. For some reason that was often enough.

By the time we arrived at Lake Birrabeen, the irritated father had already arrived, parked, and was in the water with his kids. Even so, the lake was deserted except for him and us, and it was – and this may be the only time you see this word used in its most literal sense – spectacular.

The lake is surrounded by hills, and on the clear day we were there, was a livid translucent green in its shallows: approximately the same colour as lime jelly. The sun was scorching and the water was cool and incredibly clear. We swam and marvelled at the sand, which was as fine as the snow we’d seen in Siberia.

Fraser Island’s tracks are hard enough during the day, and we left before the first hint of dusk to avoid having to negotiate them at night. Our campsite was beautiful. There were no showers and not much in the way of running water, but before long we were cooking pasta under a canopy of trees with a pair of candles stuck to our picnic table by their own wax. If it sounds idyllic it’s because it was: besides the muted noise of a few other campers all we could hear was the rainforest. Lizards crept through the undergrowth and birds screeched through the trees. Were it not for our need to drop the car back the next afternoon and our dwindling supply of cooking gas, we might still be there now.

In the morning we set out for Lake McKenzie – the largest freshwater lake on the island – and Lake Wabby. It took the better part of four hours to cover twenty kilometres, but our itinerary – drawn up by our tattooed friend at the car rental shop – was immensely satisfying. The lakes on Fraser Island are works of art, and Lake Wabby in particular. A sea eagle flew overhead and fish swam about while we swam.

By the time we rejoined the beach highway back to the barge in the middle of the afternoon, we were nearing the end of our tide window. Low tide, you see, occurs around midday, and the three hours either side of that are safe for beach driving. Outside those times you have to use the inland tracks, or risk your car being swept away by the tide. The beach was much narrower the second time around: at one point we needed to double back on ourselves when we went down one side of a creek, only to find it culminating in an impassably deep lake that hadn’t been there the day before. We breathed a sigh of relief when we made it safely onto the boat. Another half hour and we might have come seriously unstuck. Or, indeed, stuck.

Our Hilux inhaled petrol. Wombat, our Yaris, was routinely delivering six hundred kilometres on its forty-two litre petrol tank. Our Hilux had a seventy litre tank, and in doing less than three hundred kilometres, had used nearly all of it. We filled it and nervously dropped it back to Tattooed Man.

“Looks like the same car to me,” he said breezily. We wandered around the car and he confirmed that we hadn’t done anything catastrophic while we’d had it. We rented a car that was virtually uninsured, driven it over technical, difficult terrain, got stuck, escaped, and emerged from the whole thing unscathed. But my favourite part of our adventure? Getting stuck in two lanes of traffic behind a Toyota Troop Carrier that was having difficulty negotiating a pile of rocks coming off a beach. As a four by four passed in the other direction, the driver – a wide-brimmed hat-wearing, leather-faced Australian – leaned out the window and dismissively remarked: “Amateurs.”

Of course, I was an amateur too. But he wasn’t to know that.

Dave inadvertently reaches for the four wheel drive lever in his everyday car now.

Every few kilometers we would soar over a wide creek or river, across the finest steelwork I’ve ever seen. It’s as if the Sydney Harbour Bridge had a million children and sent them to give motorists a hand all over Australia’s exceedingly handsome countryside.

And it really is handsome. I had imagined that Australia would be all dusty outhouses (dunnies, if you will) and thousand-mile stretches of red, uninhabited highway. The reality was rolling hills and persistent light traffic. If your car broke down out here it seemed more likely that we’d be offered a bottle of water and the use of a mobile phone to call a repair crew than a lingering, lonely, dusty death.

Either that or you’d be crushed by a giant, fibreglass replica of something. Australians, it seems, love big things. They’re scattered up the main highways, and the exact subject of gigantic proportions doesn’t seem to matter much, as long as it’s outsized. We stopped, for instance, at the Big Banana, which is a not-incredibly-big-but-still-larger-than-a-hatchback reproduction. Incredibly, it was full of people, most of whom were behaving as if this was the highlight of their holiday. I don’t know, maybe it was. There was a museum attached dedicated, yes, to the history of bananas, and if you walked through the Big Banana itself – I know! – you could read little factoids about the fruit. Then, when you were nearly finished, you could stop in the restaurant and actually eat one of the things. We opted for a frozen, chocolate-covered ‘nana, of which there are no pictures because it was almost impossibly phallic. Certainly, it was hard to eat with a straight face. It was also disgusting.

A few hundred kilometers later we saw a giant shrimp preening atop a restaurant and stopped diligently. I have to confess I don’t really understand. Sure, it was a Big Shrimp and I’m sure the fibreglass artist who sculpted it is proud, but what really is the point? As we pulled out of the carpark I felt a sharp twinge of guilt. Since that morning we’d been on the road for five hours and passed two signs to Aboriginal museums along the side of the road, but instead of drinking in Australia’s long and tragic native civilisation, we’d stopped to look at a giant curved fruit and an antennae-sporting sea bug.

We arrived in Byron Bay as the light was fading, passing a parade of shops selling tourist and hippy nick-nacks and pulled into a beautiful campsite. At $30 a night it was on Byron’s cheaper side – we were quoted $45 by another, surprisingly run-down place across town – but it was beautiful. The lawns were almost manicured and we had the tent up under a tree in no time.

Camping in Australia is almost endlessly civilized. That’s because Australians and backpackers do an awful lot of it, and so the owners of campsite take care of their temporary charges. It’s very unusual for a campsite not to have a fully gassed-up kitchen, generally with a gas burner and a hot-plate barbecue. Australians, true to stereotype, love barbecues. Give an Australian camper the option of barbecuing a steak and saving, I don’t know, his mother, and there’ll be a lot of blinking and deliberation before he whips out the tenderiser.

This came as a pleasant surprise to me. I spent my childhood in a succession of campsites across the south of England, and at times it seemed there was a kind of competition to see who could provide the worst experience for the highest price. The holidays themselves, I should stress, were bliss in themselves, but there was always a pang of regret as we reached the end of torturing our parents for the day and headed back to the campsite. Cookers are never provided, which means my mum would cater for all five of us using a single gas cooker.

But even by Australia’s high standards, Glen Villas in Byron Bay was a beaut. Fridges, a TV and wireless internet capped the manicured lawns. It also had our dopplegangers: Chris and Lisa were staying in Byron Bay for the evening, having travelled through the US and South America and northern Australia. After that they were heading to south-east Asia. It was basically our trip in reverse: they even had a blog, the link to which I’ve rather embarrassingly lost.

Besides the beach, there isn’t much to actually do in Byron Bay, besides wander about and poke around the shops, which specialised in hippy accoutrements: beads, necklaces and the such. We sat around, read our books, and began to recover from a full three months of actually working.

After two nights we were done: it’s 2,500km from Sydney to Cairns and we needed to get moving. We headed to Brisbane. We could have visited Surfers Paradise, but I couldn’t face using [sic] every time I wrote it. There should an apostrophe in there, surely?

Dave is rested.

Unexpectedly, it turned out to be big enough to hold the gear we would camp up the Australian coast in and eventually take to New Zealand. We relieved our housemates, Sim and Rachel, of their camping chairs, tent, teatowels and a pair of pillows, bade sad farewells, and set off.

I felt every inch of that 437km. Wombat’s accelerator was positioned in such a way that at 100km – our average speed, roughly speaking –my ankle was permanently cocked at a painful angle. The thing about extremely long car journeys – particularly those made on long, largely empty expanses of road – is that there’s plenty of time to experiment. Operate the accelerator with your left foot? I have. It’s easy, as long as you don’t need to break. Steer by touching the steering wheel once every 200 yards? Fine, as long as you see the corners coming.

We arrived in Port Macquarie with an hour to spare before the sun went down. We bagged a shady spot in a $22 a night campsite and set up our tent. Twenty minutes later and we were inaugurating our new camp cooker and polishing off a large bottle of beer. This was not camping as I knew it.

Camping, you see, should be hard. I know this because when I was eleven, my family and I went on holiday to north Wales. Since then, every time a comedian brings up the ubiquitous rainy camping holiday, I wince. Rainy Camping Holidays might be the stuff of cheap yucks for warm, tipsy clubgoers, but for me they’re a painful reality.

When I went to Wales with my family it rained literally every day of the two weeks we were there. The sole exception was the last day, when the sun beamed with surprising strength on the waterlogged ground. It was as if God Himself was giving us the finger.

I had borrowed a tent from my best friend Chris. Chris was a splendid chap, but I can only surmise that he knew little about tents. The one man, polythene monstrosity I was lumbered with leaked torrentially, and the campsite we were on offered little in the way of flat ground. So when it didn’t rain, the blood ran to my head in a rough approximation of a stroke. When it did rain, which was often, the water ran downhill. Now, when anyone mentions waterboarding on the news, I nod sympathetically. I don’t care what they did. I’ve been there.

All I’m saying is I was surprised when we woke up the next morning in a dry, still-standing tent.

Port Macquarie enjoys a long, beautiful stretch of beach, three restaurants (two of which were closed), and a three kilometre distant lighthouse. We toured the beach, established the opening hours of every restaurant, and visited the lighthouse in a single day. I would, while we’re here, recommend Flynns Bookshop Café, where we bagged copies of Bill Bryson’s Notes from a Big Island and Absurdistan by Eric Campbell. They may not know much about apostrophes, but Flynns had plenty of seaside reading.

Port Macquarie also has a koala hospital. The juvenile in me hoped for a place with an intensive care ward and marsupials in tiny arm casts, and my gurning inner idiot wasn’t disappointed. Information boards in the entrance showed koalas in various states of poor health, including one in a small, tragic, purple cast. Yes!

There are free tours every day, and it turns out that for all my idiotic sniggering, koalas are worryingly close to being officially endangered, thanks to a multitude of threats including dogs, cars and swimming pools. (Koalas are decent swimmers, apparently, but have little success when it comes to pool ladders.)

There was a tour, in which a vaguely-marsupial looking woman named Maree took us around the hospital to meet those koalas well enough to live outside. We met koalas (through a fence – koalas can inflict a nasty scratch if they feel threatened) who had had unfortunate encounters with dogs, cars, and one with Chlamydia. Koalas can get it, apparently.

What gets me about koalas, though, is that they are the embodiment of unassumingness. Take this story, for instance. A woman near Port Macquarie kept a tree in her back garden stocked with food for koalas. Koalas are personable little beasts, you see, and having them around would be, I suppose, not unlike having a clutch of self-sufficient, quiet children pottering around. One day she left her back door and front door open simultaneously. The two doors were immediately opposite each other, and no sooner had a koala wandered in front of her front door and spied the food laid out than it blundered directly through the house, straight past the owner, and into the back garden. It didn’t blink as it passed between her legs and her telephone stand. Unassuming, no?

From there, it was as simple as figuring out our self-igniting gas cooker (excellent, since you ask), brewing pasta for two nights straight and hoping that we’d figure out to how to cook something more adventurous before we left for New Zealand. We spent our last night poring over a map to Byron Bay, and hoping for lunchtime restaurants.

Dave is growing an uncommonly strong Achilles heel. Vroom.

And that, as they say, is that. Three months, two hostels, two apartments, 43 work days and a brace of freelance work later, and we’re leaving Sydney. Sydney is perhaps the most spotlessly clean, beautifully-constructed and lovingly cared-for city I’ve ever visited, and living and working here has been a genuine pleasure. You shouldn’t take my word for it, either: come and see for yourselves.

Now that the photographic goodness is over, a few words of thanks:

To Chris, who put in a ludicrously good word for me with a host of editors. I would be poorer without you. Literally. As in I’d be living on baked beans.

To Jim and David, who kindly asked me to write words about websites and cameras respectively.

To Tom, who did likewise, but with Powerpoint.

To Alex and Dan, who commissioned me to write about internet browsers, search engines, laptops and cameras.

To Nick, who graciously recommended me for a job that was much, much better than any I got have found on my own. I presume he told a pack of lies to get me through the door, but I’m grateful nonetheless.

To another Nik, who asked me to write some words about a camera.

To our phenomenally easy-to-live-with housemates Sim and Rachel. Living with people is supposed to be a godawful mess of passive-aggressive behaviour and arguments over who ate the last of the cheese. Our experience has been, if you’ll allow me to slip back to mid-nineties vernacular, fabbo.

To Mendy, who coped with my grumpy reluctance to get back into the swing of work like the trooper she is.

Incidentally, these aren’t all the shots we’ve taken since being Australia: that’s because that number is 3,760 and frankly there isn’t space. If you’d like to see more, visit our Australia collection on Flickr.

He has a point. What should be here, of course, is a deserted wasteland, assuming of course, that you could even reach it, being as it is cut off by the sea and thousands of miles from anywhere inhabited.

The other astonishing thing is just how little of Australia is inhabited. Barely anyone lives here, and those that do cluster in the lower right hand corner (the south-east, for the geographically-minded). Venture much beyond that and population and towns quickly give way to nothing much at all.

This will be forcefully brought home to you if you go to the Blue Mountains. The Blue Mountains are a few hours west of Sydney - we visited Katoomba, a fabulously cosy town on the edge of the mountains that brought to mind small-town California with its comfortable coffee shops and crowded antique stores.

We ate and spent a quiet hour pottering around stockpiles of carefully-shelved Victoriana. Then we went to see the Blue Mountains.

This is the part where, if you think about it carefully, your jaw will fall uncontrollably open, and you’ll realise what a desolate and lonely place Australia can be. The Blue Mountains cover nearly 4,000 square miles - 16 times bigger than Singapore - and there really is very little there. From our high vantage point in Katoomba, the trees stretched to the horizon. There wasn’t a plume of smoke or manmade line between us and the horizon and, I imagine, there was very little even beyond that. We were just 100km from Sydney. Go 100km from London and you’d be in Northampton, which I suppose wouldn’t be ideal, but it wouldn’t be actively lonely. In the Blue Mountains, which are virtually next door to Sydney, you could walk for no more than an hour and be totally, possibly irretrievably, alone.

That, more than the view, was what I loved about the Blue Mountains. What isn’t to love about a country that doesn’t so much lie beyond the horizon as loom threateningly behind it? There’s nothing to make you feel insignificant like the realisation that you’re sitting on the edge of a virtual eternity of nothingness.

Dave is feeling a bit bigger now, thanks. Still, let’s aim not to get lost on the way to Cairns, eh?

Links

Flickr set
Katoomba on Google Maps
The early exploration of Australia

(Please open the article to see the flash file or player.) (Via Blip)

I knew our visit to the Hunter Valley was going to be a roaring success when we were twenty minutes late picking up our rental car. The impending success of our trip was confirmed when we had to drive for three hours - at night - in the most appalling weather I’d ever driven in. This had all the makings, as my Dad would say, of a trip whose defining characteristic was “memorable”. “Memorable” not necessarily being synonymous with “good”, of course.

We arrived at our hotel tired and stressed from three hours of being dragged in the wake of million-wheeled Australian roadtrains.

The Hunter Valley is one of Australia’s largest wine-producing regions, so we did what any self-respecting tourists would, and drank. Every winery in the area has a cellar door, which in theory is somewhere you can buy discounted bottles. In reality, of course, every cellar door has a free tasting bar, which is a little like a wine bar, only with more tourists in shorts, chattier bar staff, and no bill to pay at the end. True, you have to consume your wine in shots rather than glasses, but with dedication, it’s possible to get pleasantly trollied.

The weather was atrocious. We chose our hotel on the grounds that it was possible to walk to half a dozen wineries from our front door, but the reality was that walking outdoors for more than five minutes carried with it a very real risk of drowning. Our umbrella was turned inside out by the breeze and our coats were turned into sails by the wind. It was an appalling day for photography, incidentally. I’ve already treated my precious 350D to enough mistreatment, so it was kept safely in a bag lest it fill with water again.

Still, most wineries have cheese shops and fudge factories (is that the right term?) attached. I’m not sure what it is about wine that makes me also want bitter chocolate and strong cheese, but what a wonderful happening that all three exist in free, nibble-sized chunks right next to each other.

We got pleasantly trollied, and were surprised to find, when we arrived back at our hotel, that we’d brought with us two bottles of wine and a port. Those, I suppose, are the breaks of drunken wine tasting.

We did at least do the right thing. Here’s a word of advice for those on the way to the Hunter Valley: drive. There were tourist buses everywhere, and I couldn’t think of anything worse than being coralled through a tasting session and rushed to another winery. Take your time. Allow me to recommend, for instance, the Leisure Inn, which was fronted by a preposterously grumpy woman, but won us over with its private chalets, semi-self-catering and - get this - in-room hot tubs.

Stay the night. Get pissed. There’s nothing worse than being shepherded into a bus for a two hour journey when you’re wrecked. I’m a journalist. I know.

Almost as if the weather knew our weekend was almost over, the sun bounded over the hills the next morning. Blue skies, birds singing, that kind of thing. We knocked back coffee and pastries in the hotel restaurant (arrange a late checkout at the Leisure Inn, by the way), and then saw - wait for it - kangaroos. This shouldn’t be much of a shock. They are, after all, everywhere in Australia. But I’d like you to imagine for a moment that you’re a British tourist. Your first time out of a major city in Australia and there they are. The furry, bounding talisman of a continent right in front of you, acting for all the world as if it’s no big deal.

Which it isn’t, of course, but people get excited when they see wild boar in the New Forest, so our excitement was justified. There was even a joey.

We took the scenic road back, an almost surreally quiet selection of winding backroads with four lanes and no traffic. We curved our way through the countryside, past wooden houses whose nearest neighbours we had swished past twenty minutes ago. We were in ludicrously good moods. We drove slowly and pulled aside to let faster traffic through, in an unconscious homage to my Grandad.

It took twice as long for us to arrive back in Sydney. That, of course, is the problem when you pull off the road every five minutes. Back, we spent a ludicrous amount of time distraughtly searching for the car rental place, including an enjoyable fifteen minute spell in the wrong multi-story carpark.

But still, you should try it. The Hunter Valley, that is. Not abandoning a rental car in the wrong car park.

Links

Flickr set
The Hunter Valley
The Wine Front

Dave has just about figured out the vagaries of lightboxes and blip.tv video. If you think something’s gone awfully wrong, please leave a comment. Also, this week we bought self-inflating sleeping mats.

Enjoy. And feed back, why not.

(Hint: Clicking on a picture dims the rest of the site and sends you into a slideshow. If the pictures drop off the bottom of the screen, press F11 to get your browser to display fullscreen.)

EDIT: There have been some changes around here - instead of sprinkling images throughout like a crazy photographic fairy, they’re all obediently lined up. Click on one to see a higher-resolution, larger image. And let me know what you think of the new system - whether you love it or hate it - in the comments section.

After Featherdale wildlife park, Taronga zoo needed sensational pulling power. Not only is it more expensive, but at Featherdale you could actually touch the animals, and there aren’t many zoos that let you do that.

It’s Australia that convinces me that God has a sense of humour that makes Russell Brand seem as by-the-numbers as Rolf Harris. Hardly any of its animals walk: they slither, crawl and bounce conspicuously across the outback, and despite it being our second zoo in as many weeks, we wandered around Taronga gazing keenly at Australia’s finest.

We saw, for the first time, a platypus. This is my favourite creature. There aren’t, I suspect, many animals in the world to whom mankind’s reaction was a collective, “You must be joking.” The first scientist to describe a platypus was George Shaw in 1799, whose reaction involved a dead platypus and a pair of scissors: not in the name of dissection and discovery, you understand, but rather because he was convinced that the half-reptile, half-mammal duck-fish-lizard hybrid on the table before him was a stitch-up: the taxidermist equivalent of a whoopie cushion.

I always thought a platypus would be the size of a large lizard - about two feet long, let’s say - but the one we saw was twelve inches long at most, and was captivatingly, splendidly weird. The platypus is an accomplished swimmer, and can rest underwater for up to 14 minutes. It also has some of the finest hair anywhere on the planet: up to 900 hairs per square millimeter of skin, according to one site. They are also - and I suspect this is a requirement for any animal wishing to make a go of it in Australia - incapacitatingly poisonous. The male has spurs on its hind leg, and although it doesn’t produce enough venom to kill a grown human, getting stung would be seriously painful.

We wandered around the zoo for a day, wishing fervently that someone would throw something chunky and meaty into the lion enclosure to liven them up a bit.

The lions were asleep.

The next day we went whale watching. Whale watching in Sydney is something that you only get a limited amount of time to do: whales only go past the city between May and November, and the end of August is the last time the tour operators will guarantee a sighting. With the promise of a guaranteed whale in the backs of our minds, we climbed onto a boat.

Sydney Harbour really is an amazing-looking place. The water is blue and almost perfectly still: not as much as a wave laps against the Opera House. Sydney operates a huge number of ferries which - and this is great - are the fastest and cheapest way to get around, which means that you not only get to take boats across one of the most scenic waterfronts in the world, but that to do otherwise would actually take longer. We perched on the front of the boat.

(I believe the professionals call it the bow, although it may equally be the stern. Or the bridge.)

As we left the harbour’s protection we hit the open water. The boat pitched backwards and forwards: the swell was a meter (I heard, crushingly, a crew-member describe it as “only” a meter), and we did an awful lot of lurching. The boat would tip all the way up and back, and then as it crested the wave the bow fell forward into the water. It was dry, but rather rough, and whenever there was no point on the horizon to look at I silently, earnestly, repeated a customised version of the mariner’s prayer.

“Dear God. Please don’t let me vomit. I’m wearing clean jeans and carrying an expensive camera that I’m not sure will survive my own stomach acid. And if I have to throw up, let Mendy do it as well. Misery loves company, you know.”

We spend the better part of an hour and a half sailing towards Bondi Beach in hunt of a pod of whales that had been seen that morning. At one point I clambered up in search of the toilet and headed to the back of the boat. Huddled there was the sorriest group of tourists I’ve ever seen. Plastic sickbags in their pale green hands and lips purple with cold, they were a picture of perfect misery. A small child gripped his bag as if it were a life preserver and looked forlornly at the horizon while his queasy mother silently recited her own version of my don’t-let-me-be-sick prayer. I was disturbed to note an Indian chap who had earlier asked me to take a picture of him and his wife staring brokenly over the side, a small piece of vomit glued to his lower lip.

At that point, I suspected, a whale could have been beamed into a space-ship beside us and they wouldn’t have batted an eyelid.

Finally, a whale broke cover. After brochure pictures of whales frollicking and breaching like enourmous, barnacle-covered submarines, it was just the tinsiest bit disappointing. Not to disparage whales, but we’d been looking for an hour and a half on rather rough seas, and the most active our whale got was occasionally popping a fin over the waves and spouting water. If it sounds hopelessly cynical, you have to remember that to take a picture I had to close one eye and focus on something, which increased the danger of me reproducing my breakfast in an eye-catching and slippery fashion all over the deck. I wanted drama.
After three hours at sea - but at no point without sight of land - we chugged back into the harbour. As soon as we were within sight of the Opera House the waves stilled and for the first time, I had a distorted vision of what arriving in Australia must have been to the sailors who disembarked there in 1787.

Under the command on Captain Arthur Phillip, 11 boats with more than a thousand people on them landed in Sydney after 252 days at sea, braving not only a kind of seasickness that must have become rather wearing after 15,000 miles, but also astonishingly depraved conditions, scurvy and a ration of three pints of water per day each. Merely the sight of dry land would have been cause of celebration — the fact that the dry land was Sydney Harbour all the better. They didn’t know at the time, of course, that Sydney was just about the only arable land for thousands of miles, but simply getting off the boats was the acheivement of a lifetime.

And that was before they spotted the platypus.

Dave is thinking sea-sickness pills next time. More, of course, in the Flickr set.

Even better, though, we’ve joined a library.

Currently I’m reading Great Mistakes of Australian History, edited by Martin Crotty and David Andrew Roberts. Not because I wish to denigrate Australians, who are a charming bunch, but because Australia’s history is particularly varied, comprised of almost even amounts luck, tragedy and a kind of epically bad judgement that makes my 1999 decision to break into my own house, resulting in two twisted ankles, shin lacerations and a slit wrist look like a kind of shrewdly calculated plot.

I’m only in the first chapter, but – and I hate to break this to any old-style British colonialists – the English hardly covered themselves in glory when scoping out Australia.

The biggest problem was a forceful tendency to assert that Australia was not only green and pleasant, but almost totally deserted. Sir Joseph Banks, one of Australia’s first visitors, informed a Committee on Transportation that there were “very few inhabitants” Down Under. In any case, the natives were so hopelessly backward that the chances of them disturbing an attempt at colonisation were preposterously slim. “I am inclined to believe,” he is reported to have said, “they would speedily abandon the Country to the New Comers.”

Upon arriving in Australia, Arthur Phillip, the first governor of the new province, with the tone of a man who has been betrayed by a particularly unkind superior,  noted sadly that “the natives are far more numerous than they were supposed to be.” By that time, of course, it was far too late, and the British would spend the next century attempting to make homes in a country which not only refused to support their attempts at farming and subsistence, but provided them with a hostile native population that went out of its way to harm them. Not only did the Aborigines have a surprisingly strong grasp of the concept of land ownership, but the notion that they would shrink quietly into the background while the British built a civilisation was painfully disproven when Phillip, of the aghast note to Parliament, was stabbed through the shoulder by an Aboriginal spear.

Incidentally, when the English first landed, they noted that the Aborigines would cry “Warra warra”, which they took, showing a rare and hitherto unsuspected streak of intuition, to mean “get out”. Had the Aborigines noticed the English, they might have observed that the interlopers said, “I say, Jones, just what the hell is that?”, quite a bit. Australia, you see, is home to a bewildering assortment of mammals that make elephants and zebras look like close, and frankly rather dull, relatives of the kinds of mammals you might find in Somerset.

Kangaroo. 85mm, 1/50th, f/5.6, ISO 100

To see for ourselves we visited Featherdale wildlife park. Featherdale lies to the west of Sydney proper, and we spent an hour gazing out of the window as our first glimpse of Australia’s suburbs slid past the window. The thousand-metre walk from the station to the park itself took in a neighbourhood of wooden-sided houses with a quite astonishing amount of furniture in their front gardens. We counted sofas, discarded, rain-damaged TV sets and 70s exercise equipment before we happened upon Featherdale.

We were at the park for four hours, slack-jawed and stunned into silence at the wilful variety of life Australia has to offer. If day-to-day Sydney seems like a more handsome, clean, and cheerful version of San Francisco or London, then its native wildlife serves as a jolting reminder that we are very, very far from home.

The humble and ubiquitous kangaroo is a case-in-point. The face of a donkey, the upper body of a tiny, furry tyrannosaurus rex, and a pair of spring-loaded legs so powerful that an adult can propel itself at nearly 50km/h. Or the echidna, a small, long-nosed animal that superficially resembles a hedgehog, but that nevertheless waddles engagingly about the place in an inquisitively spiky manner.

Australia's version of the hedgehog. 149mm, 1/250th, f/4.5, ISO 1600

The list continues: wombats resemble nothing so much as fat, luxuriously furry pigs. Or the cassowary, a flightless bird that survives on fruit and small reptiles, but nonetheless possesses a five-inch long claw capable of eviscerating a man before he can finish asking Jones exactly what kind of bird that was, exactly.

Wombats. Sorry, what? 149mm, 1/640th, f/5, ISO 800

It was captivating stuff. Featherdale park lets its animals wonder around freely, so wallabies lay around tripping up unsuspecting Americans, and I’m delighted to report that their fur is one of the softest things I’ve ever been in contact with. Should you ever stumble across one, scratch it in between the ears.

We also met a baby Wallaroo, a hybrid kangaroo-wallaby affair. It was adorable and, we were informed by a man wearing Paul Hogan’s outfit from Crocodile Dundee, hyperactive.

“Yeah, it might look cute,” he sniffed, “but this has the destructive energy of 35 three-year-old children. You wouldn’t want it in your house. And just wait for it to mark its territory.”

Wallaby. 300mm, 1/250th, f/11, ISO 1600

“Yeah,” I thought, “But it’s cuter, though.”

I’m thinking of selling all our glasses and getting one.

Dave was sold on the prospect of a Wallaroo, until he met a red panda, and now he wants one of them. I’m also painfully aware the formatting on this page isn’t what it might be. I’ve upgraded Wordpress and I’m having teething trouble, ok?

More of Featherdale in the Flickr set.