Andy's been nagging me to show some pictures. Here are some that we've taken so far

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If it's Saturday we must be in Mebourne: capital of Victoria, Australia’s second biggest city, population 3.5 million. From the air, air huge sprawl of housing and greenery, with a prominent sky-scapered CBD down near the water. Solid, fine architecture, Hove to Sydney’s Brighton, if you get my drift

Picked up the rental car at the airport and drove to the hotel. We had printed of a route from Google Maps, and all was going well until, a couple of blocks from the hotel, a road we needed to go down was closed for road works. Trapped in the one way system, we drove around for a while, and eventually sought help from a guy running a pony-and–trap tourist ride. He was very helpful, and even stopped the traffic for us so we could do a U turn. You don’t get that in Worthing.

Our hotel is on the edge of Chinatown, so there are plenty of restaurants though, oddly, a lot seem to be Korean. A bit further along, Lygon Road is lined on both sides with eateries – Italian, Indian, Thai – so we’ll be in our element. We ate at Toto’s, the oldest pizza place in Australia (Established 1961! Inducted into the Pizza Hall of Fame!). Our waitress was a Londoner, doing a year out here before finishing her doctorate, in psychology. Later we met two ladies, weekending here from Adelaide. One grew up in Portsmouth, and is married to a man from Titchfield; the other has an Italian parent, and is married to a Ukrainian. Once the Portsmouth connection had been established, we were up and running. I read in the Qantas magazine in the plane that more than 50% of the current Australian population was either born abroad, or has at least one parent who was. That’s refreshing your gene pool on a major scale.

Tomorrow, some exploring.

How to describe the journey to Alice Springs? Well, it was very long. Still no kangaroos. Perhaps they’re a myth.

We’re in Northern Territory. (Motto: No Pooftahs!) Intllectuals thin on the ground here I suspect. The local press portrays a land of rustic idiots and wife beaters, a bit like Littlehampton, really. “Stabbed in the back while having sex, that’s why I’m a bad driver” explains one headline. Another front page shows several pictures of different sets of over-excited citizens punching each other in Darwin.

NT, for one reason or another never achieved Statehood, so they can’t vote in federal elections for parliamentarians to send to Canberra. But steps have been taken to stop them feeling left out: they do vote, and their elected representatives do go to Canberra. They just can’t vote or say anything.

Alice Springs, where we are now, was originally a staging post on the telegraph line that was being built, and named after Alice Todd, the wife of the construction manager. As there is also a Todd Mall, Todd Street and a Todd river, we may assume that Mr Todd was The Man in these parts.

The Todd river does not have any water in it, so for the Henley-on-Todd regatta, held annually in October, the boats have to have holes cut in the bottom so the contestants can run along the dry bed.

They get a lot of sun round here and the Crowne Plaza, where we’re staying, has the biggest roof-based solar generating capacity in the southern hemisphere, producing up to 80% of its energy needs.

That’s about all I can find to say about Alice Springs. Off to Melbourne in the morning.

Went to Uluru today. We have all seen pictures, but nothing prepares you for the reality – especially the way that it rises, without fuss, directly from the flat desert floor. There’s nothing else for miles, then suddenly this gigantic red rock. Actually, the red colour is iron oxide staining what would otherwise be a much less attractive grey rock. Try selling pictures of that! Higher than the Eiffel Tower, it was laid down 640 million years ago (or less than 5,000 years ago if you go to school in Kansas). There are algal deposits down the sides, from running water – it rains there from time to time – and a couple of decent waterholes. The bloodwood trees were in bloom, because it rained a few days ago; they don’t bloom on a seasonal cycle, they just wait for it to rain, then off they go.

The purpose of the trip was to see the monolith at sunset, and I have enclosed a pic of this – pretty good, no? No wonder the local indigenous folk attribute all sorts of magic to it. Parts of it, sacred to the Anunga, are out of bounds, and this is respected by the tour operators.

To Kata Tjuta. Formerly known as The Olgas, discovered in 1872 by explorer Ernest Giles, and named for Queen Olga of Württemburg, Kata Tjuta is a series of sandstone and basalt domes. Bigger than Uluru, though made of several individual pieces, not just the one. Walked the Walpa Gorge; not strictly a gorge so much as the crevice between two of the domes. Stunning scenery, parrots in the trees, and camel poo on the track.

Tjuta, Uluru, and Mount Conner, collectively the three monoliths of Central Kata Australia, are all that’s left of the once-mighty Petermann range, the rest now eroded completely away.

Haven’t seen a kangaroo yet, other than a dead one beside the road, but did see some wild camels. They are the descendents of those introduced to the country as draught animals, but which, their career cut short by the arrival of the railway were released into the wild. There are also wild horses, called brumbies, but we didn’t see any.

Took the bus to Kings Canyon, 300 km up the Lasseter Highway. 300 km without passing a single habitation. Surprisingly verdant though – they’ve had some decent rains, following fires, perfect conditions for new growth. Stopped en route at the International Coach Station of Central Australia – in reality a pull-in near a crossroads where, by prior arrangement, passengers are transferred between buses. A practical arrangement, given the emptiness of the terrain.

Just before Kings Canyon, we stopped at Kings Creek Station. ‘Station’ in this context means something close to ‘ranch’. This one farms camels, and caters to the passing trade between Ayers Rock and Alice Springs. This is the real outback, lacking, how can I put this, sophistication. If you felt in need of a camelburger, this is the place to come. Their coffee very good though.

Overnight at Kings Canyon resort, and on to Alice Springs tomorrow.

Don't pet the dingos

It is really difficult to appreciate the vast size of Australia, or the huge distances involved. We were chatting to the waitress at dinner the other night; she said that she came from a small town in NSW, about 8 hours from Sydney. If you were eight hours from anywhere in England you’d be in Germany. She said that when she and her boyfriend drove here (Perth) from NSW it took four days. It’s difficult to imagine a journey that long, especially as vast stretches of it there would be nothing at all to keep you awake.

Drove the rental car back to Perth Domestic Airport and took the ten o’clock to Ayers Rock, as the airport is still called. Named after Sir Henry Ayers, a prominent businessman and former premier of South Australia, the rock itself is more than two miles long, over a mile wide and 342m high. A single piece of sandstone, it is reputed to extend 3 miles underground (how do they know?) and is a very big deal to the local indigenous people, the Anangu. The whole area is sacred to them; in 1985 the land was ceded back to the Anangu, and the traditional names reinstated. The land is currently leased back to the Australian government, and jointly managed

Flying out here – a relatively short two-and-a-bit hours – you can see the barrenness of the land. With no cloud to obscure the view you could see that there was absolutely nothing down there but baked ground and scrubby vegetation. The only visual variety was that the ground became redder as you got nearer the centre. While you are waiting for your luggage to come off the belt, you can read a poster warning you to watch out for dingos. Their advice is not to stroke them.

We’re staying at what is really the only place you can stay, given there is no town as such, the Ayers Rock Desert Resort, which is a complex of hotels, restaurants, shops and whatnot. It’s completely self contained, and everything’s very expensive because it has to be brought in from a long way away. Everyone who works here has to live here as well. It’s around 30 degrees now, much cooler than in summer, we’re told, and there’s a surprising amount of actual green, as opposed to scrubby, vegetation here. Flies are a big problem. They’re harmless, just a nuisance, and a lot of people are going about wearing hat-mounted mosquito nets. It looks a bit idiotic, but it may be better than flies up your nose. We’ll see. Tomorrow (Weds) we go to see Uluru, staying until sunset to see the changing colours, followed by a barbie. The following day we’re up very early to see the rock at sunrise, after which we go on to the next bit of the tour, Kings Canyon. That ends up, the following day, at Alice Springs.

Internet access is very difficult to find so this may be my last posting for a few days

Sunday, 30+ degrees, so we headed for the beach. The Sunset Coast, just north of Perth city, goes from Cottesloe up to Scarborough, miles of white sand. You’ll get the idea from the picture. To get there you have to get down to Riverside Drive, then onto the Stirling Highway. What we didn’t know, though everyone else in Perth did, was that today is the Perth Triathlon. The cycling bit was taking place along Riverside Drive, so all the access roads were closed. We had no choice but to head into the city, where we had an hour or more of sitting in a jam, trying to find a route, anywhere. We couldn’t even get back to our apartment. Eventually we discovered that we could get to Kings Park, where we knew we could park and get some lunch, and wait for the roads to reopen.

After some lunch, and a visit to the Aboriginal Art exhibition, we could see traffic was moving along the river, so we headed off up to Cottesloe, three hours later than planned. Given it was a Sunday, and hot, the beaches were pretty parked up, but we found a place at Swanbourne (or Swanny, as it says on the life guard’s hut) and had our first dip in the Indian Ocean. The swell was not enough to please a surfer, but enough to trouble you if your bathers elastic was a bit dodgy. If you like the beach, this was the place to be: a few surfer dudes, families, a beachside restaurant with showers, and a life saver hut with Swanny on its board. What more could you ask?

Kings Park was established at the end of the 19th century and covers 1,000 acres of Mt Eliza, overlooking Perth. It is mainly bushland, but includes many cultivated areas showcasing the flora of WA, and botanical gardens. There is an elevated treetop walkway, so you can get a better view of the colourful birds. Up the far end, where we didn’t go, there are child-friendly interactive things. In addition to the usual information centre, coffee place, and shop, there is a memorial to the Western Australians who died in the two World Wars, and another to the victims of the Bali bombing. Also, the Aussies are keen on commemorating notable Australians, especially if they were influential in WA. So there are plaques everywhere: some for various women’s groups, perhaps active in the suffrage movement, often merely for existing at all – the WA Macedonian Women’s Group for example, for their contribution to something or other. There are lots of men honoured too – local politicos, some bloke who was the chaplain in the goldfields, anyone who in some way made things a little better. The best thing, though, is the fantastic views it offers of the Swan River, and Perth itself. It really is worth the trip for that alone. The picture shows a typical view.

We entered the park by climbing the 242-step Jacob’s Ladder, and noticed that, when we left, around 6pm, the steps were being used as an impromptu jogging track by a surprisingly large number of people, some just running up and back down several times. Back home you have to join a gym for that sort of thing.