Just wanted to add that I had a lovely birthday on Wednesday. Thanks to everyone who sent birthday messages. We had a relaxing day sitting, paddling and having lunch by the beach and then Chris took me out for a delicious Thai dinner in the evening.

Woohoo!

After three miserable days in the dingy subterranean Kings Cross Backpackers Car Market, we've sold the car. That's a huge weight of our minds, giving us four more days to enjoy Sydney before we fly to New Zealand.

Here are some photos of our journey from Melbourne to Adelaide, and of Kangaroo Island and the journey back from Adelaide to Sydney. Enjoy!

The car has now passed it's safety inspection after requiring a little more care and attention than we would have liked, but we've now put posters up in Bondi and the city and are hoping for some calls.

Phew... after some long drives through the outback we've made it back to Sydney - our old hostel in Bondi, to be precise. It's taken us about a week to get back from Adelaide, though we had a couple of stationary days where we stayed to see some local sights.

The first place we stopped for two nights was Mildura. We took a day tour with Harry Nanya Outback Tours to Lake Mungo NP, a dry salt lake which has signs of human settlement from about 45,000 years ago. Across the eastern side of the lake is a long sand-dune (the "Walls of China") which is being blown by about 1 metre each year. As the sands shift, old Aboriginal camp sites are being uncovered. During a short walk across the dune we were continually finding old camp fires, and food remains including wombat and fish bones and emu egg shells. There have also been finds including buffalo-sized marsupials related to the wombat.

We also stayed a couple of nights at Forbes, a nice small town about 400 km west of Sydney. From here we visited the CSIRO Radio Telescope at Parkes (as featured in the film The Dish). The town of Parkes from the movie was actually shot in Forbes, because Parkes itself looks a little too modern to be made to look like something from the 1960s. (i.e. they've knocked down the old buildings to make supermarkets).

What's more, we got to see the Big Orange, the Big Lobster and the Big Rocking Horse. And a scarecrow festival. And we got to meet some colourful real-Outback locals in the bars. You can't say our journey wasn't eventful!

All that remains in our last couple of weeks in Australia is to sell the car. It's generally been good, taking us a little over 9000 km on about 1100 litres of petrol. It's a very good thing that petrol is half the price here to home! That's not quite all... We're going to see South Africa vs. Georgia in the World Cup Rugby on Friday. Should be fun, if a little one-sided!

From Melbourne we drove along the Great Ocean Road admiring the scenery in between the rain showers. We stayed the night in Port Campbell and spent the morning walking in the National Park seeing lots of beautiful cliffs in different formations. We even spotted an echidna in the bushes. We then drove up into the mountains of the Grampians to be greeted with more rain. It was less heavy the next day and we walked up to the Pinnacle for views across the range. In the evening we took a short walk to the cricket oval and watched eight kangaroos having their dinner - two of the kangaroos had joeys in the their pouches.

After the Grampians we drove west into South Australia and up the coast to Adelaide. We spent three days on picturesque Kangaroo Island admiring the rugged coastlines and native wildlife. We saw lots of koalas, fur seals, sea lions, wallabies and kangaroos and a few small fairy penguins. We also got to stroke some friendly kangaroos in the Flinders Chase National Park.

Back in Adelaide we've been on a tour of the Barossa Valley with lots of wine tasting and spent today relaxing by the beach at Glenelg. Tomorrow we start our journey back to Sydney heading through the outback and stopping at a couple of places on the way.