Albany, Right in the southwest corner of Australia is a small former whaling town called Albany with a modest population of 37,000. Albany has a different climate to the rest of Western Australia with much more cloud and rain. I…
The ship docked at Fremantle which is an urban area within greater Perth. Well what a lovely surprise Fremantle was. Even the container port could be described as 'rather fetching". We stopped here for an overnighter and thought we'd do…
The low expectations theory certainly worked yesterday in Exmouth as we resumed the Australia circumnavigation. With only 2,500 residents Exmouth is very small and I was reliably informed that the nearest McDonald's restaurant was a mere 800km away in Geraldton.…
We arrived at 10am on the island of Bali which is a huge tourist destination for Australians. Again located in the Lesser Sunda island chain Bali has a population approaching 4.5m and the island is ten times the size of…
Komodo Island lies just 8 degrees below the equator and is famous for its large lizards but it could be equally famous as the sweatiest place on earth. It is one of the 17,508 islands that make up Indonesia which…
We had three days sailing after leaving Cairns, first through the Barrier Reef before rounding Cape York at the top of Australia, through the Torres Strait which separates Australia and New Guinea, over the top of the Gulf of Carpentaria,…
The night before we arrived in Cairns, Ben and I found ourselves in the piano bar with the pianist Barry from Boston. Ben volunteered to sing the male part of a song from Phantom of the Opera and Jules (middle…
October 25th marked the midpoint of this trip and also the 2nd anniversary of my travels and the very first blog in Hong Kong. We sailed into the Whitsunday Islands early and anchored near to Hamilton Island. The Whitsundays are…
Brisbane is the capital of Queensland and the third largest city in Australia with 2.4m people. Named after the river on which it stands on which in turn was named after a Scotsman called Sir Thomas Brisbane who was the…
Sailing towards Sydney during our last night of the first segment of this cruise, the seas became quite rough and as a consequence I awoke at 1am and couldn't get back to sleep. This was the roughest night we'd had…