Idlelaide

Tuesday 5th April

Wow I am so utterly crap at updating this thing, we are now in Adelaide and I hadn't realised how long it had been so sorry!

To be honest there wasn't a huge amount to write about the last week or so in West Australia.

We lost our car to the mechanics for a few days and they kindly rented me a bright purple Daewoo with a sun burnt roof to drive around in (which i promptly broke quite spectacularly by taking out the entire front wing).

When will these people learn not to trust me with their vehicles?

From there we headed down to Esperance and Lucky Bay which was absolutely spectacular with some of the most breathtaking coastline that I have ever seen in my life and an abundance of kangaroos milling around the campsites and sunning themselves.

We made it across the Nullabor, albeit having to fill up with petrol 4 times and oil twice, which meant that upon arrival in Adelaide our lovely little van went straight back into the garage.

When we reached South Australia we spent a few nights in coffin bay a beautiful little coastal village with its own seal colony and occasional shark death.

On our first night there we met a crazy Vietnam war veteran who informed us that we would be accompanying him on his fishing trip the following day, he had a similar persona to the crazy fisherman from the original Jaws film and there was a very good chance that he only invited us to use as bait.

Amazingly we did catch a fair few fish during the course of the day and he even drove us out to the adjacent island so that we could see the sea lions frolicking in the surf which was cool and we returned back to shore with all of our limbs which was even cooler.

We had seen adverts for cage diving with the great white shark in Western Australia and it was going to be our one blow the budget item when we reached Port Lincoln, however when we got there they wanted to charge us over £1000 so we bottled it.

Instead though we did get to come face to face with a giant great white, although this one was made out of papier mache and had cost us $3 to view, it also had the added bonus of an overly enthusiastic tour guide who obviously couldn't believe tourists had finally shown up to see the "Shakka" the shark.

She continued to linger around the entire time that we were there and you could tell how proud she was of this giant Blue Peter model that was quietly sat gathering dust in the back of the visitors centre.

Following on from there we headed north up the Eyre Peninsula and other than the occasional skink on the road we didn't see a huge amount, we spent one night in Port Augusta and then continued down the Yorke Peninsula which had much of the same.

We have been spoilt rotten here in Adelaide, Linda, Mark and their kids, Roan and Maeh have gone out of their way to ensure that we have been very well looked after, we have been totally blown away by their hospitality and are amazed that they didn't kick us out as soon as they saw the van pull around the corner or the moment that they smelt us :-)

As a result we haven't seen a great amount of Adelaide as we have been really lazy and its been fantastic, we have completely vegged out and recouped but its going to be hard to get back onto the road tomorrow :-(