Quality Inn Charbonier Hallmark Singleton

The next day seemed to be nothing but driving and you don’t see a lot in the red centre…. Well desert and its red and that’s about it, passed through Tennant creek then which is a whole of a town… full of vagrants and stopped for the night just outside the ...

... crannies between the rocks.

The children both adored wandering about the park and clambering over the rocks, and Alec writes:
At the Devils Marbles I did the biggest walk I have ever done in my life [all by himself].

In a complete break with character, we all arose before dawn to see the whole show again from the other side. For an overnight stop, we took an awful lot of pictures!

Hmmm Wine! Thats not all that you can say about the Hunter Valley - but it sure is a lot of it. One of the wine regions from South Australia - well New South Wales to be precise. A whole weekend wine tasting and hanging around in the forest with my friends cooking up the best Aussie BBQ.

... B&B about it. In fact, the whole of Katoomba is a bit Lake District really, with its activity tour operators, twee coffee shops and absolutely dismal weather. There was a conspicuous lack of pubs, and the only one open was exclusively patronised by men who looked like they'd been thrown out of the benefits office. It is a really nice little place though (Katoomba, not the pub), and if the postcards for sale in the shops were ...

... By sheer excellent planning (not on my behalf I might add), we all met up and hired bikes. There was myself, Paul, Megan, Sal, Vito, Claire, Miriam, Victoria and Kerri (friend of Mo and Vic). It was going to be a good weekend, again with a good bunch of people. The bike hire man turned up with our bikes and off we set. Unfortunately the weather had been pretty rough on the way up and seemed to be settled in over Hunter Valley ...

... actually didn't drink wines at all at home back in Yorkshire!! The final stop was at a small winery called Ivanhoe, which had the nicest setting and possibly also some of the better wines but by that point we couldn't really tell! To finish the tour off we stopped at the smelly cheese shop to sample some local cheeses and also some excellent ice cream!! It was good:) Returned home quiet merry!

Well after 2 months in Sydney it was time to leave and I was so excited to be going up the East Coast. Ed and I were up fairly early and jumped on the bus heading to surf camp as we had booked on a 5 day course up to Byron Bay. Nicole had also booked on the course at the last minute. Once at surf camp, which was just like a hostel but was only for people doing the surf school, we had some lunch and then we were back ...

well we made it out of that hell hole newcastle down under is quite small but nice its quite funny as most backpackers r heading up from sydney and r dissapointed by newcastle as they r used to the big city lights but as we have come frome scone the horse capital of oz which is tiny we think its gr8t went to the pub for free dinner and did the pub quiz which gooooooooooooooooooooes on for ever but hay we came third third i here u saythat not that good but u didnt ...

So Maury (a fellow AustraLearn student) and I made plans to go on a daytrip on Wednesday, since neither of us had class (yay for that). We decided to go to the Nan Tien Temple which was absolutely insane. The place is gigantic, and extremely peaceful, especially considering that it is in the middle of a very industrial area. We walked around the temple for over 3 hours, just checking out all the ...

... point. The points of interest on the road are then marked and its really strange to think that there were chain gangs building the road less than 200 years ago. You can still see the holes they bored for the dynamite to blast away the rock and also the grafitti they carved to mark their names on the road side. During the week following this, Stephen headed off to New Zealand for a trip. I enjoyed a lovely evening with newlyweds Chloe and Iain as they ...