Hi everyone,

Can't believe our time in Oz is now over - time is literally flying by. We spent our last 2 weeks in the crazy land of Oz on the West coast. Flying into Perth we spent a couple of days exploring and quickly understood why so many people love it. Set along the river bank it is very open and green. We could easily have spent a few more days here but as usual there wasn't enough time. We picked up another campervan, this time a really little one as it was only for 10 days, and set about exploring the west coast. First we headed south through the wine region of Margaret's River and then along the south coast through the towns of Albany and Esperance. The coastline and beaches there was amazing, easily the best in Oz and some of the best we have seen so far. Turquoise blue water and fine white sand plus some amazing cliffs and rock formations including our favourite, the elephant rocks. Many of the beaches are empty so we enjoyed having a gorgeous beach all to ourself for a couple of hours one morning. We could easily have spent the rest of out time here alone but there was lots to see and very long distances to cover so we had to move on.

We hot footed it back up towards Perth to start exploring the coast going north from here with a quick stop en-route to see the famous wave rock that, you guessed it, is shaped like a giant wave. It's actually quite impressive as is 15m high and has amazing colours running down it in vertical stripes. We took the compulsory 'pretend I'm surfing' pics and spent a very hot night in the campsite there as its located in the outback without the benefit of the nice sea breeze we'd been enjoying for the last few days.

Next stop was the pinnacles desert which we knew little about other than it has some strange rock formations sticking out of the sand. So we were pretty taken aback when we found ourselves on a sand track doing a (very slow in our campervan) 4km trail among these huge columns of rock which seemed to stretch almost as far as the eye can see in all directions. Some were over 12 feet tall and its still a mystery as to how they were formed - one theory being they are calcified tree trunks or something like that.

It was then time to get back to the beach scene with an early morning visit to Monkey Mia to watch and feed Indo-pacific dolphins. A pod of 7 came in to the bay including a number of babies and we learnt a little about how this species differ from the much larger common bottlenose dolphin. There were lots of other wildlife on the beach too including a huge pelican that stood several feet of the ground and some emus. Further up the coast we spent a couple of days at coral bay to relax on the beach and snorkel on the reef there. The coral just off the beach wasn't quite as good as we hoped but lucky Alex saw yet another turtle and we'd like to go back there some day to dive off the reef further out - it is meant to be even better than the great barrier reef as it has been less affected by tourism.

With about 1200km to travel to get back o Perth for our flight we then had to spend a couple of long days on the road with just a stop at Kalbarri national park to break up the driving. This didn't exactly go to plan as the 30km trip to one of the gorges turned out to be a very bumpy dirt track (which we weren't insured to be on - shh don't tell the hire company!) and meant we rattled and shook along for over an hour each way to see just one of the sights we'd been planning rather than a quick drive to see a few different sights. That will teach us to get lazy and not read up on it in the guide book first - sometimes winging it doesn't always work out to well!

Although the distances were long and at times never-ending we loved the experience of driving in the outback. It seems to be everything you imaging Australia to be, long straight roads with red dust either side and roadkill almost constantly along the side of the road, plus a few live ones too - quite scary when you come across emus or even a large bull in the road! It was only doing this trip that we truly started to understand how vast Oz really is.

Once back in Perth we had a final day left to relax and choose to visit Rottnest island where there are few cars and so we hired bikes and spent the day cycling from bay to bay swimming, sunbathing and snorkelling. It was the perfect day until we received a phone call saying our backpacks had been found on the beach... After a lot of confusion (we didn't know we had lost them at this point) we worked out that someone had broken into our van and stolen our stuff. Fortunately it was a British army officer who'd found them and he went out of our way to bring the bags back to us, all that was missing was a PDA and the van itself was still there minus the door lock. So all things considered we were very lucky and it turned out OK, though perhaps not the high that we had hoped to end an otherwise very successful trip to Oz on.

All in all, we love Australia and hope to go back some day to see some of the things we've missed and have a bit longer to appreciate some of those gorgeous beaches.