Our bus journey up to Exmouth from Perth with Redback Safaris was great. On the first day we stopped at the Pinnacles Desert, which has lots of... erm... limestone pinnacles. We also got to try out sandboarding -- basically sliding down a huge sanddune on a surf board. The next day we spent mainly in Kalbarri National Park, which has lots of impressive sandstone gorges, fossils, and other rock formations. After that, on the Friday, we went to Monkey Mia in Shark Bay. We got to see mother dolphins with their calfs feeding in about 30cms of water right on the beach. We also went snorkelling at Coral Bay on the Ningaloo reef from a glass-bottomed boat. We had a super time, but I managed to swim backwards into some coral which left some nasty scratches on my back. (They're healing okay, but are extremely itchy right at this instant!) We've been snorkelling again since then at Turquoise Bay and the Ningaloo Reef Retreat, where we saw turtles, and Fi saw two reef sharks, an octopus and a giant blue clam.

We'll try to post some photos from the trip when we're back in Perth.

Since the tour finished I've spent the three days prior to today in a swimming pool practicing to get my PADI Open Water scuba diver's certification. Today was my first day in the sea, and it was fantastic, hence the urge to write this today. :-) As well as just enjoying floating around feeling weightless, I got to see lots of sea life, including several wobbegong sharks, a white tipped shark, and a turtle just resting on the bottom. I tried getting some photos with an underwater camera, but I'll have to see if they come out okay. Tomorrow I should complete the diving course, and hopefully will get to see some more great things. Fi has booked herself onto another glass-bottomed boat tour with snorkelling, and I'm trying to persuade her to try diving when we get to Cairns. She's had a persistent cold this week so wouldn't have been able to take lessons here. :-(

Tomorrow we catch a tour bus northwards, arriving in Exmouth in five days time, seeing lots of stuff along the way. I'll be taking some scuba diving lessons when we arrive there, and hopefully we'll both get to see some of the Ningaloo reef.

Here are the photos from our driving tour of the South-West corner and South Coast of Western Australia.

You can see from the photos that we had a great time on our driving tour. We drove about 2000km, but only covered a tiny proportion of the country. Some of the highlights were:

• a dolphin eco-cruise with dolpins surfing along at the front of the boat in Bunbury
• beautiful walks through the karri, jarrah and tingle forests around Pemberton and Walpole, including sections of the Bibbulmun track
• stunning beaches near Margaret River and Walpole
• wine tasting and an excellent lunch at Chateau Xanadu
• colourful parrots and other birds
• the Gap and Natural Bridge rock formations just south of Albany
• climbing over rocks to the top of Castle Rock in Porongurup National Park

I also had the chance to practice my driving a lot and feel much improved - driving in Australia is certainly a pleasure with hardly any other cars in sight.

We're now back in Perth planning our onward adventures. We're thinking about heading North and exploring the coast up to Exmouth or Broome, and then flying over to Alice Springs to see Uluru and Kings Canyon.

We've just got back from a ten day driving tour of southwestern Australia, pretty much following the coast southwards from Perth towards Albany. There's lots and lots of beach and forest between here and there. More on that later, maybe tomorrow.

Here are some photos of Singapore, and Perth and Fremantle which we've got transferred to CD. Enjoy!

We also have photos from the southwest ready to upload too, but that may take a while longer. There are some very good ones though. :-)

We have now been in Perth four days, and have seen much of the city centre. Apart from mostly aimless wandering, we've hired bikes for a couple of afternoons to explore Kings Park and the banks of the Swan River. Perth is the smallest city we've been to in quite a while - it feels more like a big town really, with a population of only 1.3M, but it's very friendly.

Today we took a train out to Fremantle, visited the Western Australia Maritime Museum including a very interesting tour of a 1960s submarine, the HMS Ovens.

Nothing much else exciting to report. We're staying at a backpackers hostel where we've cooked our first meal in almost two months. I've also had a haircut, which you can look forward to in our next batch of photos.

Yep, it's been a quiet few days, but nice and relaxing.

Just to add a couple of things...

There's an awful lot of SARS information everywhere we look. Televisions on the subways and busses are running continuous information about how to protect yourself and what to do if you show symptoms. There are now posters all over our hotel, and belatedly we've been asked to fill in a form asking whether we've been to any infected areas ("yes, but we didn't leave the airport"). On our arrival at Singapore we were made to walk past a thermal imaging camera to see if we were feverish. Taxi drivers and various staff at the hotel are wearing badges to say when their temperatures were last checked. By comparison, In China there was hardly any information at all except what we saw on the English-language state TV station, Channel 9, which basically said "it's all under control".

Incidentally, in the last couple of days our tour company Intrepid has decided to cancel all itineraries in China.

On another note, we've bought a new digital camera - a Canon Powershot S50 - somewhat blowing our budget for Singapore. We paid over 100 GBP less than the UK Amazon price, but only after traipsing around too many shops in Chinatown and the Orchard Road area. We're not entirely sure it was worth the time and effort to find the best deal, since all the prices were about the same and my bartering skills still aren't great. Still, we're pleased with the camera and should have some better photos as a result.

We safely arrived in Singapore after 5 temperature checks along the way and have been enjoying the tropical weather for nearly a week. We're staying in a district called Little India which has wonderful smells and delicious food and we've even been out dancing to Indian music at the local disco. We've also visited vibrant Chinatown, seen the colonial centre which looks very European and been overawed by the number of shopping malls on busy Orchard Road. Highlights of the week have been stunning views from the cable car ride up to Mount Faber, seeing the multitude of orchids at the botanical gardens, a bumboat trip down the river and a free outdoor concert by the harbour. Today we spent relaxing on the beach and going for a dip in the sea.

We fly on to Perth in Australia tomorrow.