Just to put the journey into context. 🇦🇺

We are now in Cairns after dropping the van off and will be flying to Melbourne on Tuesday to self isolate. The next few posts are from the last 3 weeks – so please don’t think we’ve been ignoring the medical advice on social distancing. I’ve included a map of the distance we have travelled on the east coast of Australia, over 3,500km and on average 3 to 5 hours driving a day and we take it in turns. We’ve listened to 100s of podcasts of Desert Island Discs (Kirsty Young is our favourite interviewer and if you need a good cry – listen to the episodes with Nigel Owens and David Nott); There’s no Such Thing as a Fish and Soul Music from Radio 4. All brilliant, funny and often thought provoking as we’re putting the Kms behind us. Noosa Heads is a beautiful place and we stayed close by at Lake Cootharaba, in the rain – but surrounded by families of kangaroos, literally outside the van. A magical place. Walking in the Noosa Beach National Park we saw surfers of all ages and incredible wildlife including hundreds of butterflies… we struggled to decide which were the more beautiful! All the guidebooks recommended a trip to Fraser Island but instead we drove to Inskip beach where the ferry collects the 4×4 vehicles to take them to the Island. So far we have never found any rubbish on the beaches in Australia but here there were dozens of empty beer bottles washed up the shore. As we collected them up we spoke to one of the ferry guys who said unfortunately this was a regular sight but that someone who lives on Fraser Island makes $700 a week collecting beer bottles for which you get 10 cents a bottle! If my new lifeguard career fails I can always be a bottle collector!