We've now completed our 1300km trek south from Port Douglas to Gladstone and we've had a great time! Just for the record, we've also hit Mission Beach / Dunk Island, Townsville, Alva Beach, Airlie Beach / Whitsunday Islands, Eungella National Park, Mackay, Yappoon / Keppel Islands, Agnes Water, Bundeberg. This North Queensland experience (Queensland is huge!) has been a mix of cautious rainforest probing, SCUBA diving on the Great Barrier Reef, crocodile spotting, island exploration and national park hunting - we've seriously struggled to find some of the poorly-signposted national parks, burning along dirt tracks with just a high level map, a compass, our wits and, after giving up on those, a frighteningly expensive iPhone bill!

One of our first experiences, and certainly one to cement my great impression of Oz, was an Irish bar which served me a properly chilled Strongbow in a proper pint glass - forget Fiji; this was paradise! More seriously, the shift into a developed country with similar culture and values is striking.

Unlike, say, Venezuela, we feel really comfortable and safe here. That said our rental car broke down almost immediately, leaking its last drops of engine coolant onto the Bruce Highway towards Port Douglas. Fortunately a switched on Aussie flashed us like a lunatic while flailing his arms to indicate we should pull over... well, either that or he was an epileptic requesting assistance.

In Daintree, an enthusiastic Aussie (and they pretty much all are) taught us about the Lawyer Cane vine - this is a clever and determined rainforest inhabitant, so called as, once it has hooks into you, it never lets go. We also learnt about the Stinging Tree, an innocuous-looking little tree with leaves which deliver hundreds of toxin-laden spines into human skin on contact - there's no antidote and the neurotoxin causes glandular swelling and a good deal of pain for up to 8 months!

From the rainforests, we headed quickly for the ocean, taking a large catamaran speedboat to the Great Barrier Reef. Here we enjoyed some fantastic dives with beautiful corals and tame fish. We also made a noteworthy new friend called Nick, who proved our most zany dive instructor to date and, apart from the Movember handlebar tash, is quite indistinguishable from our good buddy, Dan Balme.

We also squeezed in an amazing wreck dive of the SS Yongola, which sunk off the coast near Ayr 100 years ago taking all 120 people aboard with it! The wreck is now teeming with underwater life from poisonous caterpillar things to poisonous sea-snakes to black tipped reef sharks. Over lunch, we learnt that the skeletons that were found have been stashed in the ship's bulkhead - grisly!

Tomorrow morning we're hoping to get Em on a surfboard for the first time - naturally we'll be dressed in our jellyfish defence suits, which make us look that little bit more like the distressed seals that sharks rate so highly... wish us luck!