Clock up number 47, if I have my maths right. I’ve finally made it to Japan! I ended up having to get the bus to Cairns Airport as the weather was so bad. It’s not a long walk (around 1½ hours) but in torrential rain it just wasn’t happening. Thankfully this meant I got there [...]

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After meeting my first hostel-owner now driving tour buses across Kakadu, I was surprised to see a familiar face outside my hostel in Cairns when I arrived this morning. None other than Heath, the man who instructed me through my Open Water PADI course over two years ago! We got talking and he’s still with [...]

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Another airport post, this one from Darwin International Airport. I’m heading to Cairns, have 6 hours to wait until my 3am check-in and have free wi-fi. Annoyingly, I only have an hour’s battery left on my laptop and none of the plug sockets seem to work here. Grr. Once more as I move from city [...]

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A veritable nature trail over my handful of days here. On Thursday, Katie and Ben drove me to the nearby Fogg’s Dam reserve. It’s quite a small place, but very pretty and loaded with birds. There are a handful of crocs around here, too – one persistent salty in particular – but mainly it’s our [...]

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Time for the final stint. I woke and had a simple breakfast of very bad cereal. What country would allow Sugar Puffs without the sugar onto the market? It’s like grains of polystyrene only more tasteless. And I bought it by accident. Orienting myself again using the sun, shadow positions, bird flight patterns, and the [...]

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I woke, packed up the van and headed south to the first picnic spot I could find. Here I parked up again and prepared breakfast: sausage sandwiches and HP sauce. Yummy. It was stinking hot and not even 9am when I put all the food stuff away and headed south. I’d have preferred to have [...]

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I walked up to Apollo’s office early doors to collect the camper van. After filling in a gazillion bits of paperwork and watching a DVD on its operation, I was handed the keys and sent on my way. There were various provisos: I couldn’t take it off unsealed road except to get to campsites and [...]

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One big issue with Townsville – the public buses run fairly small routes and virtually none run at all on a Sunday. This means I had a hell of a walk out to the edge of town towards the highway and Cairns. An hour took me to a McDonald’s a few kilometres out where I [...]

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I am now sat in McDonald’s in Cairns as it has free wifi. They’ve had a lot of business out of me in Oz since they rolled this out across every branch. However, the reason I’m posting is that I’ve finished hitching all the way from Adelaide to Cairns (with brief uses of public transport [...]

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The train pulled into the new Townsville station at around 10:15. In case you’re using an old map, this is about 500m further out of the town to the west than the “proper” station. While walking into the city, I passed the old station which looks like a traditional British one. Fairly recently, I think, [...]

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