Chapter 1. Delhi to Pushkar

Chapter 2. Arambol to Fort Cochin and back again

Chapter 3. Singapore to Bangkok

Chapter 4. Koh Phangan to Pangadaran

Chapter 5. Yogyakarta to Exmouth

Chapter 6. Adelaide to Brisbane

Chapter 7. Noosa to Mount Maunganui

Chapter 8. Auckland to Home



On the way to Yogyakarta, the ancient capital of Java, the train stops at a number of stations lined with hawkers eager to climb aboard and ply their goods to us, the captive audience. The man opposite me stretches out a hand to the woman with the large silver bowl on her head and she instantly crouches to the floor and unpacks a quantity of ingredients into her square foot workstation. In 30 seconds she constructs the meal, first the base banana leaf, then blanched greens, rice noodles and a cold marinade of water and red chili paste flung over the whole dish. The train begins to move out of the station and suddenly the hawkers are panicking, jostling towards the end of the carriage, the women more quickly than the men as they have more to carry and are less adept at getting off the moving train. I didn't see what became of them but the train didn't stop and no one screamed so I can only assume they all made it.

I arrive in Yogya towards dusk and rely on a friendly looking Indonesian man at the railway station to show me a few budget hotels in the backpacker district. It's a mass of narrow, look alike alleys and in the gathering gloom of sunset I look at one and then another and another. They are all reasonable and good value but I choose the third and check in for the hundredth time to another new home.

When I arrive in a new place I like to get out of the hotel quickly and have a look around. Today though was to be the day where complacency got the better of me. It was only when I had been walking around the main shopping centre for a while that I realized that although I knew roughly the area where the hotel was, I didn't know the exact way to get back and even worse I couldn't remember the hotel's name. The cardinal rule is, always take a hotel leaflet when you leave or write down the name. Many travelers make the same mistake at some point but its disconcerting being in a strange city and having no idea where your backpack is. I wandered round for a while as it started to rain and I was not seeing anything that looked like the right place. Somewhere from the depths of short term memory I felt the hotel sign was green and began with an M. Melissa, Mona, no Monica wasn't it Monica. I asked someone local and they threw out a hand over that way. I asked again and was pointed round the corner. After another couple of wrong moves I turned the corner and breathed a deep sigh of relief. Hotel Monica. I hope I don't make that mistake again.

I found the touts quite aggressive and persistent in Yogya, something I had not seen in other parts of this country. They are also quite sly about trying to get you tied into spending. Batik is a big local earner here. It's some form of tie and die using wax to create patterned clothes or paintings or suchlike. Several of the locals had mentioned to me that this was the last day of an exhibition of art students and I should really see their work. On further examination however it turned out to be an exhibition of Batik and just another way to scam the tourist into parting with rupiahs. I never did go to that exhibition which annoyed the touts no end. In the morning the street is awash with men with fumigation machines. The owner of the cafe where I'm planning to take breakfast tells me that they are fumigating for mosquitoes to stop the spread of dengue fever and so I have to go into the main shopping street to eat something. I'd like to eat more from the street vendors but I've seen their version of washing up which involves taking the bowl just finished with by a customer, swishing it loosely in a bucket of dirty water beside the stall and setting it back on the side ready for the next person.

Yogya is well known for its two impressive temples just out side the City, exhibitions of traditional Indonesian dancing and Maliboro Street a long shopping strip that draws people from all over the region. The next morning I choose to take the local bus to one of the temples, the world heritage site of Borobudur, a huge square structure set in landscaped grounds and overlooked by the volcano of Mount Merupti. Built in the 8th Century, Borobudur looks like a square tiered birthday cake in grey granite, 100 feet long on each side and 50 feet high. The walls are carved with intricate figures that tell the stories of the Gods and on the top sits what look like huge bell domes each made from interlocked carved stone pieces. The backdrop of white smoke from the summit of Merupti gives the place an ancient, mysterious feel and its difficult to believe this was being made by craftsmen at the same time as Christianity was just arriving in Anglo Saxon England.

Indonesia is a big country. I have only been traveling through its biggest island Java, but already I have covered 31 hours going east from Jakarta and the next journey is another 9 hours by bus to Mount Bromo. I met a couple of Danish women briefly in northern Malaysia who raved about sunrise over Bromo so I was excited to see it for myself. We arrived at Yoshi's hotel after dark. It's cold at Bromo as we are some 2000 meters above sea level. If you want to see the sunrise you need to get up around 4.30am and travel the three and a half kilometers to the viewing points. I struck a deal with one of the waiters in the hotel restaurant who runs a sideline in transporting tourists on his motorbike. We arranged to meet at 5am but I wasn't going to get much sleep that night. The hotel staff obviously thought that as one of the only two guests staying in the hotel, I wanted a room call even though I hadn't asked for one and the first door knocking started at 3.12am. I ignored it. The next came at 3.50am and I asked them to 'stop knocking on my door'. Then 4.15am. 'Go away!' and finally at 4.30am someone mumbling in Indonesian at the door with 'Go now' stuck on the end. I finally got up and was ready when Udi knocked at 5am. It's obviously still dark when you can't see much from the back of the motorbike. When we arrive at the view point there are only a handful of local people around, mostly starting work in the fields in the cool of the early morning.

As the first specks of light glance through the trees in the east, you see the volcanoes emerge from the gloom in a place that looks like the top of the world. White mist clings and swirls across the floor of the plateau waiting for the heat of the sun to burn it away. I have never seen anything like it and the scene has to be one of the highlights of this trip if not one of the great views of any lifetime. From where I am high up on the side of the valley a flat ash covered plateau stretches for half a mile before the volcanoes of Bromo, Batok and Kursi burst out of the ground. To the left Bromo is flatter and wide, gray in colour and smoking white gas. To its right is Batok, with tall compact walls of green with sides that look like pleated fabric and to the rear, the highest of the three Kursi, which erupts a plume of grey ash every ten minutes. You could believe this was an elaborate film set for some epic of the dinosaurs, and in fact it would not appear at all unusual to see a tyrannosaurus wandering around down there on the plateau. After half an hour witnessing this extraordinary picture of the earth that has not changed for many millions of years, we climb back on the bike and ride down to the village at the edge of the crater where Udi leaves me to walk across the plain to the foot of Bromo.

As the sun moves higher the mountains come into sharper relief and the jeeps from the surrounding hotels arrive next to Bromo with hoards of visitors who like me will climb the two hundred steps up to the crater. At the top, the crowds gather amid sellers of lucky heather who want you to throw the flowers into the pit and make a wish. It's a beautiful morning and dozens of people are getting photographed from every angle. After another hour I have to depart as the bus to Bali is leaving soon and although I would like more time to walk in the valley I have made the decision to go today. Something tells me that maybe one day I will be back here. The bus is two hours late and with a nine hour journey ahead we are all getting tetchy about what time we are going to get into Bali. I don't like arriving in new places in the dark as it becomes much more difficult to find decent accommodation and somewhere to eat. In fact we arrive at Kuta Beach at nearly midnight and six of us head off round the deserted streets of Poppies Lane 1 to find a bed. After another hour we are getting tired and frustrated. So far all on offer are ridiculously high prices but a guy sitting on a car bonnet smoking under a street lamp offers us a room at a cheap rate. This has to be the worst room I've stayed in. Even in India I didn't have to share with cockroaches and the bedding is dirty. I put my sleeping bag liner between me and the sheets and admit that sometimes you just have to take it on the chin and know that tomorrow is another day.

Kuta looks much better in the morning sunshine and my priority is to find a new room before the 11am checkout. I find somewhere just off Poppies Lane almost immediately and for the same price as the room from hell, so the day has started well. Kuta is perhaps the most famous beach resort on Bali and sadly it's the place where the nightclub bomb exploded in 2001 killing and injuring hundreds of tourists and locals. The town has built itself around tourists and the impact on the economy has been hard, made harder by another bombing at an up market restaurant in another resort in 2005. Kuta remains a concrete ensemble of tee shirts, belts, day trips, eateries and bars. The locals sit about in front of their shops all day and night hounding the passers by with anything they can think of to get you to take an interest. Their tactics are to hit you with an attention seeking comment that's difficult to ignore, ranging from 'good morning' to 'excuse me' to 'yes sir you remember me'. After a while you discover that the only effective response is absolutely no response at all, not a glance not a word not a move of the head. The beach is even worse. Every 30 seconds someone will be on your case, ice cream, chess set, massage, manicure, bow and arrow, drink, surf board hire and so it goes on. The scene takes me right back to Arambol beach in India. It's a shame really because I think the local people would get more business if they just left the tourists alone. All the hassle alienates the visitors so much that you end up completely cutting yourself off from engaging in any contact with the locals unless absolutely necessary.

The beach at Kuta is very long and golden, fringed with palms with hoards of surf boards stood upright under the trees. The water is full of surfers, mostly Australians taking a sun break in Bali away from the cold autumn temperatures of their home. I hear it is only getting up to 12 degrees in daytime Perth at the moment. It's going to be such a shock when I arrive there in two weeks time, after sweating my way through five months in India and Asia. I just hope I don't fall ill with some shock reaction to the massive change of climate. Nevertheless, that is still some way away and I still have the sunshine of Bali to enjoy.

After moving fast through Java I am taking a few days in Kuta to do absolutely nothing. I feel slightly guilty at being so lazy but its been a busy couple of weeks and I am recharging my batteries. I spend a few days with a leisurely breakfast, reading, listening to podcasts from the BBC, chatting with other travelers, running on the beach at sunset, and browsing in the clothes shops which often ends in some modest purchase. As the sun goes down and the waves lap onto the twilight of the beach, the shallow water reflects soft colours of failing sunlight falling behind the clouds on the horizon. They are pinks and light blues and greens like a sheath of mother of pearl over the sand.

In a day or two I will take a journey north across the island and see more of the natural beauty of Bali that I hear so much about. Robyn and Lilliana are staying at the Diana homestay as well, two middle aged Australian ladies who love Bali and have been here many times. I find them both rather eccentric, rather like two characters from a tv comedy. Robyn runs a boutique in Freemantle, 20km out of Perth and Lilliana married an Indonesian guy and flits back and forth between Lombok (the next island to Bali) and her hometown of Perth. It's particularly odd to hear Lilliana speaking Balinese in a thick Australian accent. Robyn is here partly for a holiday and partly to buy fabrics to sell in her shop. It is on their recommendation that I choose to go an hour out of Kuta to the cultural centre of the island, Ubud.

Sometimes I think about the things I miss from home. Perhaps the act of missing is just recognition of the things that make you happy. Today I miss Yorkshire tea by Taylors of Harrogate, cold white wine with my friends, walking in the vale of Llangollen, hanging out with my teenage son, playing squash with Andy, cooking a new recipe and watching the birds on a summer sunset from the sun deck on top of my kitchen. God willing, they will all still be there to enjoy again when I get back.

I arrive at Ubud in the hot sunshine of midday and accept a recommendation for a guest house. The tourism is so down on past figures that the local businesses are desperate for your trade and what is on offer tends to be good value and good quality. Once again it's a budget room with a terrace and lovely views of the garden for less than 2 pounds a night. I feel almost embarrassed paying so little. Ubud is known as the cultural capital of the island, famous for its traditional dancing and art. It's a small town of only four main streets and every few paces you'll find a shop displaying canvasses that spill out onto the pavement. Much of it is mass produced tourist fare, paintings of the Lord Buddha or island birds but look hard enough in the side streets and you will find small galleries of serious art including contemporary Balinese. There are quite a lot of well to do looking middle aged Australians here as it's inland and so the young surf crowd don't tend to come here. There are some smart bars and antique shops, quaint architecture and some beautiful temples with large elevated floors, ornate doors painted gold and red, and sour faced guardians driving out the bad spirits.

Annoyingly, you can't set foot on the street without constant cat calls of 'transport', 'motorbike' or 'dancing' and it follows you round all day and night until you get back to your room. The first evening I take dinner at the Cafe Rosa which is actually not a cafe but a very nice restaurant and obviously well known in the guide books, as its the only place in town that's full of people. It also has the benefit of a terrace of tables overlooking the temple behind the restaurant where twice a week a spectacle of bali music and dance is played out. To the left of the stage a line of drummers, to the right a line of musicians striking what look like a cross between bells and chimes. The music is strange to the ear. It doesnt seem to follow a melody like European music, instead its more like a chant, a cacophany of notes played in a rythm that is obviously ancient to Indonesia. On the spot lit stage the players are dressed in sparkling outfits of gold and red and blue with strong featured make up, moving through their sculptured choreography. Its a pleasure to sit at my table eating traditional Indonesian food and watch the drama unfold.

The next morning I take an organised tour to some of the islands temples, terraced rice fields and the most famous lake and volcano on the island. There are only three of us in a van which could take six and the driver tells us that compared to tourism previous to the bombings, the island has lost more than half of its visitors. Vicky is an architect from Yorkshire who has been working in Sydney for a year and is now on her way to work in the Caribean and Rebecca is an Australian who runs a camping shop in Perth. I'm templed out in Asia but the rock temple is interesting as its high walls were carved by hand tools out of the rock face in the 8th Century. The holy spring temple is very pretty, built on a natural spring and you are encouraged to doase a little of the water over your head as you enter. Towards midday near the north of the island we reach Batur, another extraordinary panorama of three volcanoes, this time accompanied by a huge fresh water lake at their feet. The guide tells us that the reason Bali is so green is because of the huge sub terrainian lakes and springs. The bright sunshine gives the water an aqua marine colour against the black ash from Mount Batur that sweeps down its side like a robe from the summit to the water's edge. Like the sunrise at Mount Bromo on Java, I have never seen a view like this before and the beauty of the water rippling in the afternoon breeze gives it an added dimension. After a pleasant buffet lunch at a road side diner overlooking the mountains we head back to the Ubud some sanctuary from the heat of the afternoon.

Bali is a beautiful island but I don't find it the paradise some people describe it as. Towns like Ubud are full of deseased wild dogs scavaging for food in the gutters, the locals burn rubbish everywhere which stinks and is very unenvironmental. Having said that the natural countryside is stunning in places and the people are very friendly once you get over the spending issues. I would like to have seen more of it but I'm running out of time again. Soon I need to track my way back briefly through Kuala Lumpur and Singapore to take my flight out of Asia and into Australia. This feels like a watershed time in my journey, perhaps the natural half way point and I take a moment to think about some of the real highlights of the trip so far. I sketch down some of the big memories of the last five months in my notebook; sunrise at the Taj Mahal, camel safari in the Thar desert, sunsets over Arambol beach, the nightlife of Bangkok, the reclining golden Buddha at Wat Po, shopping in Singapore, tubing down the river in Vang Vieng, scuba diving off Koh Phi Phi, trecking in the Cameron Highlands of Malaysia, dawn at Mount Bromo in Indonesia and of course the pleasure of meeting and spending time with the many people I have met so far. It's quite a list and I never forget how privileged I am to have had this opportunity. I can only hope that Australia, New Zealand bring as many amazing experiences.

The other question I am asking myself is how the experience might be changing me as a person. I certainly feel liberated. It's a wonderful feeling to be away from the hamster wheel of conventional living. I think when I go back I will make more effort to get out and do new things especially at the weekends. I have also further shed materialism on my travels but that doesn't mean I don't like 'stuff' as I do miss clothes and some of the comforts of home. I have learned a few new skills too; how to constantly adapt to change which of course you have to do all the time as you keep moving on and on. I have learned how to live life as an adventure taking the opportunities that life presents every day and trust my instincts. I have also become much better at building relationships, as you meet so many people from different walks of life and backgrounds.

On my way through Singapore I stay at the same hostel that I enjoyed so much on the way out. Tony the owner half recognizes me but gets my name wrong but why shouldn't he, he must see a thousand new people a year. It's 10.30 at night and I'm all but ready to turn in when Eucharia sits down opposite me with her hair tied back, wearing reading glasses and book in hand. She is tall, 5'11, slim and looks studious. My first guess is that she is German. I take the opportunity to say hello and soon discover she is fact Irish but living and working at the University of Hiroshima, Japan. We exchange some conversation about my five months on the road and her two-day conference in Singapore and there is obviously chemistry in our body language. I wonder why she is staying in a hostel and it turns out that the people who invited her to speak at the conference put her up in the Hyatt the night before, but tonight she must make her own arrangements and she prefers to keep costs down. There is something about Irish women, the soft lilt of the accent, the kind sparkling eyes and enthusiasm for life. She had me at hello. We venture out into the night of the Joo Chiat Road to a food stall a few doors up and talk about how to liberate the tank of live frogs waiting to be deep fried. I ask her to cause a distraction by fainting while I grab the critters and high tail it down the road toward the park and freedom. It sounds a good plan over a beer but the owner has his eye on us and the frogs are looking altogether disinterested in their liberty. That night we spend together, a short but so sweet romance that we know has to end at breakfast but is as beautiful as a bright spring morning in the mountains of Wales. It's an awkward goodbye neither of us want to make, but we exchange email addresses and the conference is pulling her away down the street. I turn back into the hostel and get stuck in the moment, over another cup of tea.

Australia

The first and most obvious comparison you make between leaving Singapore and arriving in Perth is the space.  Singapore is constantly struggling for it while Australia has more than it knows what to do with.  As the Boeing 737 tracks south along the western coast of Australia you can see through the patchy cloud great plains of unoccupied territory with long single roads stretching from one end of the horizon to the other, interspersed by agricultural landscape.  An Australian I met in Bali put the size of this country into perspective when he told me Australia is the same size as North America and you can't get anywhere in a hurry.  The climate changes can be as different as night and day from Perth in the west to Brisbane in the east, Darwin in the north to Melbourne in the south. As the aircraft turns in at the mouth of the Swan River and loops left over Perth, the afternoon sun glimmers off the distinctive skyline and wide blue water.

  Before I arrive I know that Perth is both the most isolated capital in the world and has more sunshine than any other.  Set apart on the coast of Western Australia, the City is clean and modern, set out in a grid formation and the buildings in the centre play together in an interesting mix of modern glass towers against 19th century settlements, which look like they were exported from a wild west movie.  It's the beginning of winter here but the sun is shining and it's still hitting 21 degrees in the day. The locals think it's cold but that must be why so many Europeans are drawn to the climate here.

  From the city centre it's a short walk down to the Esplanade that skirts the river side.  From here you can take the ferry to fashionable Freemantle or Rottness Island.  In front of the ferry jetty is one of Perth's landmarks, the Swan Bell Tower, a 50 foot spire of green glass enclosed on one side by ship sails made of brown copper.  The tower holds the bells from St Martins in the Field church in London and claims to be the largest musical instrument in the world.  Along the embankment there are cycle paths, running paths and walkways aside manicured gardens and wide open spaces of bright green grass. The major hotel names look out across estuary, Hyatt, Crowne Plaza, Sheraton and others.  

  To the west of the City center is Kings Park, a favorite Sunday hang out for all ages, set on a hill called the Mount and home to the City's most exclusive apartments. From the highpoints of the park you look over the freeway to the river and beyond that, the central business district of 21st Century Perth. The park is immaculately kept with avenues lined with gum trees and memorials to those Australians who gave their lives in wars around the world. Viewpoints of the city jut out of the hillside and hoards of visitors have their picture taken against the panorama.

Living here is also very different to what I have known. The hostel in Northbridge is 2km from the city center and far larger than Asian hostels. With 240 beds, the place is alive with bustle, mostly Irish young men and women coming to work in Perth for a few months and then travel around the country. Interestingly there are very few Australians in the hostel and I hear that often these hostels won't accept bookings from young Australian men because of the trouble they cause with liquor and girls. The hostel runs much more formally than the small Asian concerns. It has to. With such a high turn over of people, bedding, booze, food and laundry the whole place would descend into anarchy if there were anything less than a military efficiency to the place. The average age here is 8, ok it's 21 but I feel like I'm the teacher in a secondary school. There is no one else over thirty here and this morning it feels like I'm taking class 4B for swimming at the local pool. All the boys watch the girls and girls watch the boys, some get terribly drunk, pick fights or call someone a conniving bitch. There's a very odd Aussie guy in our room at the moment. He hails from Darwin and within 10 minutes I know that he is in Perth to try to patch up a major family fall out which resulted in his mother taking out a court injunction against him. In addition he has a rare form of epilepsy, women problems and now has no job. I try to give him some encouraging words but the other two guys in the room just reckon he's crazy and steer clear of him.

After a few days I finally have an orientation on how I am going to tackle this huge country. In Asia there seems to be an obvious route from one place to the next but here the choices are so widespread you have to adopt a different approach. I have done a lot of research and thinking in the past days, asked opinions, read lots of free literature at the hostel and considered the likely outcomes of each choice. It serves you well to think carefully here as act in haste and repent at leisure. Even if you decide that you are definitely heading north up the coast from Perth to Exmouth or Broome, you have a number of choices, buy a car, hire a car, try and get a lift with someone from the hostel, take a Greyhound bus or take a backpacker tour. In the end I decide to make my first major jaunt across the continent by backpacker tour. Jolanda one of the hostel staff tells me the Greyhound buses are ok but they drop you on the main highways and you have to take a connecting shuttle bus towards the towns from there. Alternatively a bespoke backpacker tour takes you to a lot of out of the way places of interest and the cost, which is inclusive of all meals and hostel beds, is not that much more than a Greyhound pass.

With this decision made I hand over the Visa card for 8 days of action busted backpacking on the roads of Western Australia. The next morning I take myself off down Beaufort Street to catch the blue line Cat, a free shuttle bus service that ferries people by three different routes around Perth. It's a great way to get a feel for the place and I spend a pleasant hour driving through the bars and cafes of Northbridge, across trendy William Street, along the Esplanade by the river through the new bus station and up into Hay Street and the City centre. On my second circuit I start to worry that driver thinks I'm taking up residency so I hop off at Hay Street to stroll around the shops. There you will find London Court, a rather strange arcade of specialist shops dedicated to all things British with each end of the lane made up in mock Tudor with the flag of St George, a castle keep and a portcullis. Otherwise the shopping center could be any small city in England and it's easy to feel at home here. The culture is very similar to Britain, as are the people and, of course, the language. It's also a great pleasure not to have people jumping out in front of you trying to get you to buy rubbish, arguing over inflated prices or engaging the waft of stinking sewerage in the streets.

I have a couple more days in Perth before my voyage north and so today I take a day trip thirty minutes south by train to the port of Freemantle. Freo as it's known locally is a pretty town of boutique shops and maritime heritage where I spend the day following the tourist trail of the historic market, the prison, town hall, maritime museum, round house and harbor.

In hindsight joining an organised backpacker tour of the west coast of Australia was a very good decision, especially when you experience the terrain at first hand. This is a very very big country and the highlights are both spread wide apart and difficult to get to. I suspect anyone trying to do so by public transport would find all sorts of logistical problems and spend most of their time getting there rather than being there.

As we leave the cool green wine plantations of the Swan Valley outside Perth our 24 seat coach driven by Wayne the tour guide, hits the long straight coast road in the early morning sunshine and we begin the 2000 km journey north. Our first stop is the Nambung National Park and the Pinnacle Desert. The Pinnacles look like hundreds of dirty gold tree stumps standing in sand. They are in fact the product of a unique set of geological circumstances where a combination of regressing ocean and lime means that the roots of a forest which stood here millions of years ago have been petrified into a thousand pillars some of which stand three meters high. Like most places on the tour we have just a short time to explore here before its back on the bus and hit the road to our next stop. We follow the Batavia Coast named after a famous ship that was mutinied and wrecked on this coast and in another hour we arrive at the Ocean Gorges. This area of WA is has many gorges formed from the retreat of the oceans. The whole landscape was once deep under water and as the water receded the seabed eroded the land to leave these savage cut valleys. For sunset we arrive further along the coast at an area of sweeping sand dunes bathed in the fading sun. Wayne unloads the sand boards for our first experience of riding the slopes of the desert. I'm pleased that my recent foray into ocean surfing gives me some confidence and after an initial wipe out I manage to slip my way down the 30 meter incline to the basin of the dune. This is a good ice breaker as until now everyone on the bus has kept to themselves, surveying the enemy and holding their ammunition firm. The sight of people wobbling, flying face first into the sand and screaming in fear helps to break down barriers and get people talking.

The sun dips down below the sea and we scan the blue for a puff of a whale surfacing for air in the twilight. The Batavia coast is well known as a migration path but we see nothing and it may be included in the brochure more in hope than expectation. Accommodation is budget but adequate and we spend the evening talking travel and trying to work out the rules of Aussie rules football that's playing out on the TV. Day two and we are up early and on the road again. The sky is blue and the temperature is rising as we move north. Long trousers are replaced by shorts and shoes by flip flops. At the Kalbari National Park we visit Nature's Window a beautiful gorge like a small version of the American Grand Canyon. The thing you notice first here are the flies. I have never experienced flies like this. They are prolific and aggressive. They attack you at every opportunity, trying to get into your ears, in your mouth, your eyes. Perhaps it is the heat or the fact that there is so little for them to feed on out here that anything vaguely edible gets set upon. Suddenly we understand the purpose of that great Oz icon, the hat with corks dangling on strings. Some of the tourists have nets that cover from their hat to their neck but we have to battle on, swatting, spiting and whacking our way to the viewing points.

The bus is moving again and it's noticeable that as we head on, the traffic grows less and less, the trees of Perth are shrinking to become bushes and scrub and the earth at the side of the road is turning more red with every mile. The west coast is far less popular with travelers than the east and most of the traffic here is forty meter long road trains, freight lorries that have two or three long trailers attached, thundering along the never ending straight highways. Sunset tonight is at Shell Beach and except for a family of Japanese visitors we are the only people there. Space is not in short supply in Western Australia but water is. They call this 'big sky country' hundreds of miles of nothing in every direction, unspoiled and undeveloped hard bush where you can die from the snakes or dehydration in an afternoon. Australians tend to be pretty straight forward and straight talking people and Shell Beach as you might expect is made entirely from hundreds of millions of tiny white shells of dear departed sea creatures. Wayne says that you can dig ten meters down here and still be in shells, that's how long the process has been happening here. It's another perfect sunset and the cameras are out in force.

Our next destination is Shark Bay, a peninsular off the west coast that is designated as a world heritage site. We stay at Monkey Mia, famous for the morning feeding of its wild dolphins. At 7.30am the beach near the jetty is awash with onlookers and the rangers are commentating on the dolphin project. In fact only five of the wild female dolphins are fed here to encourage them to feed their young. The sight of a dolphin lying on its side in the shallows being hand fed fish by a six year old is striking but I'm not sure its in the best interests of the animals. That afternoon we visit the Stromatolites. You might think that the oldest living thing on earth would be exciting but the truth is they're not. These clumps of bacterial rock are said to be the things that first produced oxygen on earth and thus promoted the first signs of life on the planet i.e. Plants. We stare at them and they sit silent in the shallows of the bay quietly producing a bubble or two of air every few moments. The next two days of our week in the west focus on the Ningaloo Reef and the resorts of Coral Bay and Exmouth. The Ningaloo is said to be the best fringed coral reef in the world and lies just meters off the beach. Kenny, Will, Iris, Jorkim, Hue and I make the most of the snorkling. Coral Bay is warm and uncrowded. The water is clean and clear, a secret sanctuary not widely advertised, but Turquoise Bay in the Cape Range National Park is outstanding. Wayne tells us that this has to be one of the best snorkeling places in the world but its only when we enter the water that we can see why. Just a few feet from the shore the dark mass of coral sits under the surface teaming with life. There are too many varieties of fish to count here, some in shoals, some alone. The water is only ten feet deep but it's alive with yellow, black and white stripes, parrot fish nibbling at the coral, silver backs, the odd turtle and even a reef shark hiding under a shelf in the rock. No Reef Sharks don't bite people but disconcertingly it's only at the end of the day that Wayne tells us that a women was bitten on the leg by a shark here just last week. He dismisses it as rare and for us its too late to have second thoughts.

The final two days of our week are a sling shot back to Perth and there's a lot of miles to cover. Along the road side there are hundreds of huge termite hills. They look like brown bee hives perhaps two meters high as it's difficult to tell from the bus. There is also a proliferation of insane kangaroos that sit by the roadside with twitchy ears and blank expressions, watching the bus approach before deciding to bounce out in front of our vehicle just before we get parallel with it. No wonder there are so many roadkill roos and wallabies around here. Our penultimate night is spent on a farmstay, a former sheep station where the sheering shed has been converted into a common room for the visitors. There are still many relics from its past here, the pens where the sheep waited to be shawn, the motors above the pens that drove the sheering clippers and the deep ingrained smell of sheep urine in the floor boards. On our last day we call into a wildlife sanctuary to hold snakes. These are endangered species of non-venomous pythons that are reared and let out into the wild. No one is screaming or running out the door as the creatures are slung around necks and on heads. It's a fun hour but we must push on and after 6pm we arrive back in Perth in the dark. It has been a fast moving week of early starts and late finishes with long games of cards, charades and chess eating up mile after mile of road. It's been a genuine pleasure to share it with these people but we are all feeling a little stir crazy and in need of some personal space.

Back at the Billabong hostel I enjoy a glass or two of Chardonnay before my head starts to drop and I head for bed. I'm looking forward to a great night of sleep and am enjoying one right up until 5am when I wake to the constant coughing wheezing and throat clearing of the guy in the next bed. Pulling the pillow over my head doesn't help and after an hour I pull on my clothes and head down to reception to ask for a room move. Thankfully they have another vacant bed and I return to 50 to pack my gear and move to 35. As I enter 35 four of the guys are just getting up for work or a day trip. It's 6am and they rustle, zip, unzip, clank and crash their way through another half hour as I lie face down on my bunk. Momma said there'd be days like these. I manage to catch another hour somewhere between 7 and 9am but I need to get up or miss breakfast and on this budget missing free breakfast is not an option.



 Indonesia - To get from Pangadaran to Yogyakarta you take the local bus from the local bus station to Banjar and then go to the train station and get the train which takes 5 hours and costs 90,000 rupiah in business class

 The backpacker area on Yogya is called Sosrowijayan Street. I stayed at the Monica Hotel. Conclusion very good

 Sometimes you will want a cup to drink out of but its rather a bulky item to carry a plastic one around when you only occasionally have need of one. What I do is take a one liter plastic water bottle and cut the top off to form a handy temporary cup.

 Don't go traveling with just one ATM card as you will be asking for trouble. I was in an internet cafe yesterday and an American guy was trying to phone his bank in the states as he had left his ATM card in the ATM and of course when he went back it had gone. How did it happen? Well when the cash came out he took it, then the transaction receipt and then left without taking his card. I recommend you take 4 cards, one credit, one debit and two travel money cards available from the Post Office.

 In Kuta Beach Bali I stayed at the Diana Homestay on Poppies Lane. Conclusion very good.

 Perth - The City operates a free shuttle bus city around the centre of Perth called The Cat. There are three routes; red, blue and yellow and it's a great way to get a free idea of how the city is set out. Look out for the Cat bus stops on all of the main roads. You can hop on and off as you please.

 I stayed at the Billabong Resort hostel in Northbridge. Conclusion very good although it is a little out of the centre and no supermarkets nearby.

 The tour I took up the west coast was with Planet Perth. They go from Perth on Saturdays and Wednesdays and the cost is around 720 dollars (300 sterling) for 7 days including meals and accommodation and entry to national parks. I thought it was good value and a great way to see lots in a week.