Hey There,

Well, we have finally arrived in Adelaide. We decided in our wisdom to take the Indian Pacific train from Perth to Adelaide to experience an alternative Australian mode of transport. This journey is said to be one of those amazing train journey's so we thought we'd give it a go.

So we left Perth at around 12 noon Wednesday and arrived in Adelaide at 7am Friday!!! But having just spent five days being rushed around on our tour of the SW, we were quite happy to sit around reading, listening to music and watching the desert (all 500km of it) and the outback go by. Well, Rich was only happy when plied with lots of sweets! Still, we stopped at a gold mining town called Kalgoorlie, which was an "interesting" place. We paid to go on the bus around the town (at midnight!) and saw the beautiful old buildings built in the times of the gold rush. Then we headed up to the superpit, which is no less than 3km long and 1.5km wide, with plans to extend in the near future. The trucks in the pit truly do look tiny!! Finally, we were treated to a nosy (from the bus!) at the brothels for which the town is apparently famous. Well, I guess you gotta keep those miners amused somehow! Our next stop was around 14 hours later (!!!) in a place called Cook which has a population of 7 and many amusing signs dotted around. And we'd finally arrived in South Australia, the driest state of the driest country on Earth - ooooh I'm thirsty!

Adelaide is a really nice city. It's much greener and there are so many nice parks and the Botanical Gardens around that it's impossible not to feel chilled out. We have spent a couple of days wandering the city to get a feel of the place and check out the old buildings around town. We also took the "must do" winery trip to the Barossa Valley, which probably would have seemed more beautiful had the sun been shining! Still up at 8am and three wineries visited before lunch! I reckon we did fairly well. We went to the Jacobs Creek winery and then a few smaller places that only sell to restaurants and at the cellar door. So, some of them ship over to the UK, so maybe when we a little less skint, we might try some of them again. The beach here is in a place called Glenelg, but is not a patch on the SW beaches that we have just been treated to. Nice enough for a city beach though. We went to the Rodney Fox Shark Expo. This guy got attacked by a shark in the sixties and has since become an advocate for them and worked on films such as Jaws and numerous documentries. Interesting place, although mostly because the guy there very nearly convinced us that diving in a cage near Great White Sharks would be a great idea. He made it sound so good. I'm only glad that it costs $1500 each, otherwise I reckon we might have been there already!

So that's Adelaide so far. We have hired a car to drive over to Melbourne and complete the loop of Australia. We have 17 days left here and it all feels slightly strange!

Anyway, hope you're all well,

Love

Kate and Rich xxxx

After escaping the "routine" of Badgingarra, we booked ourselves on a tour of the Southwest corner of Australia. We took 5 days to travel down to a beautiful place called Esperance and back to Perth via lots of little places on the coast.

We reached Esperance having visited the Dog Cemetary (don't ask) and Wave Rock, which is merely a giant rock that looks like a wave. Esperance is another beautiful place. What can we say. Again have a look at the photos and you'll see where we are coming from. The sands are sooooo white and the waters crystal clear and turquoise. There was a bit of a wind chill so we didn't actually make it into the water, but the view was fine from where we were! We went to Cape le Grand National park and climbed a huge rock to see views over the area, it was good to see although knackering after doing nothing for so long! We saw Sammy the Sealion, who unfortunately had a bad cold and sneezed a lot. Bless!

We then went on to a place called Albany and visited beaches like the photos all day long, which can get a bit tedious even though they were so beautiful!

Day four took us to the Tree Top walk where we got scared 40m above ground and wandered through the treetops in this huge forest. The walkway was all a bit wobbly and it doesn't help when you have a pesky German behind jumping up and down!! (Alex!!) We then visited the Bi-Centennial tree which has a look out at the top (72m high) which you can climb to using the lovely rods that are stuck into the tree. There's a handy net to catch you if you fall sideways, but no harness, helmet or handrail, which is helpful! Needless to say we didn't manage it, although the crazy German Walkway Wobbler got all the way to the top, so he could well be forgiven. After this, we were treated to a trip to the honey shop, where they sell all things containing honey. The wine was good, but the ice cream lacked creamy-ness, but was nice all the same.

Finally, day five took us to a chocolate factory and a winery, before 9.30am! We managed to complete all the tasks required and weren't too tipsy before heading off to climb yet more rocks from one beautiful beach to another. We did manage this treacherous climb which had us leaping over Elephant Rocks while the sea flowed in and out below. We managed to get a bit more flexible during the climb where we had to lift our legs over our heads to get through certain bits (with mosquitoes enjoying their lunch at the same time). After lunch of chicken Fajita's BBQ stylie at Yallingup, we headed up to Bunbury via Bussleton Jetty. It's the longest wooden jetty in the Southern Hemisphere, apparently. It's beautiful, but we would have been more impressed had we not been on a strict 15 minute countdown to leaving. The joys of tour groups. Finally we went on a dolphin cruise in Bunbury and were thrilled that the dolphins rode on the bow of the boat, which we haven't seen before. Basically the dolphins swim really fast at the very front of the boat and look to be having a whale of a time! Rich felt it was not unlike a dog sticking it's head out of the window and enjoying the breeze, which seems fair enough!

We'd love to say the group we were with were fantastic and sooooo much fun. But we can't lie! The Danish people were very solemn looking and I still don't know their names. Seasoned travellers too, maybe they should head home and look up "fun" in their dictionaries! Still, the rest of the group were ok, if a little quiet..... maybe we're just loud?!

Have fun people

Love

Kate and Rich xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

We just got sooooooo excited about our life in Badgy, that we forgot to tell you about what life was like in Perth Pre-Badgy. Oooops!

I guess you may (or may not) be wondering what happened to our little place in Perth, with the beautiful spa bath en-suite. Well, we basically struggled to get work in Perth. I think we were too late for Christmas retail jobs and then the office work was drying up, although we were told there was loads of work, which was slightly annoying. We were very welcome to work in bars for menial amounts until the not-so-wee-small hours of the morning, which we obviously didn't fancy. So, we headed to a travel club place in Perth and were introduced to Badgy....and to be honest how could we refuse?! The details on that are already up, so we hopefully haven't confused the issue too much.

Anyway, there are already some photo's up that show you the beautiful Rottnest Island. It's just off the coast and we spent a full day there. We hired bikes and rode the length and bredth of the island. Much to the delight of two sore bums for days! Still, the island is just amazingly beautiful. The pictures of the beaches and the reefs show you a little bit of what was around every corner. We were also lucky enough to spot lots of Aussie Quokka's which are only found on Rottnest. They too were around every corner and hanging around the cafes like teenagers!

Fremantle is a city just down the road from Perth. We took the train and bumped into a fellow mango picker who was unfortunately working in the local lobster factory be-heading the feisty creatures (can you see why Badgy looked so appealing?). Nothing special to report there, just meandered around for a while.

We also visited Cottesloe which is a beach not far away. Nice enough but not a patch on Rottnest.

And then, Badgy was calling, so we dropped everything and ran! Having bought lots of things to make our lives easier in Perth. Ah well, the next tenants will have had a nice surprise!

Love

Kate and Rich xx

Well Folks,

We made it out alive. No need to send the authorities out in search of us!

Firstly, a very Happy New Year to you all. So what can I tell you about Badgingarra? I can tell you that we enjoyed our time up in 'Badgi' working in the roadhouse flipping burgers and serving customers and occasionally pumping petrol. We also saved a lot of cash (safely stashed in our medical kit!) which was the main aim of the game.

However, there's two sides to every story and if I was to tell you that on our first day I was tasked with cleaning packets of extra strong mints and Kate nearly sliced her finger off twice and constant power cuts you might get a different idea ......

In the main Kate was working in the kitchen and I was operating the till serving customers though we both did a bit of everything. We tended to rack up around 40 hours a week over 6 days, some with early starts (6am) though they were more for Kate! The people running the place and those working with us were really friendly and made us feel right at home. The initial thoughts that we'd be getting burgers every night for tea proved to be wrong (thankfully) and some nights we were treated to big T-bone steaks, spare ribs, crayfish, tiger prawns, lamb cutlets and much much more. The best bit being that they cost us no more than $5 (2 quid). The caravan accommodation that we were provided with left a little more to be desired (like an extra 3ft's width for the bed for example), initial thoughts were, this is horrible but once start spreading your stuff around it's fine. Having said that it was a vast improvement on the Mango picking accommodation.

The main downside to the whole thing was what to do with our time off, not having transport and all meant we were left with sleeping, watching DVD's, reading, watching England give the Ashes away (obviously this made Kate even more bored), sleeping, reading, watching TV, sleeping, reading, ...... you get the idea. The heat somedays made it impossible to do anything else anyway, even with the air-con. One day we reached 43 in the shade and outside in the sun people told us it was 51 degrees!

As you may have noticed Christmas and New Year has been and gone for another year. Ours was what you might call unconventional (well for us at least - though our first together strangely enough). We did have Christmas day off and spent the morning opening pressies and cards, so thanks to all the people that sent those. We then enjoyed an Aussie Christmas lunch which was still turkey but with salad and a few other meats, again very nice. After glugging a bottle of wine we got on the phone to speak to our families which was really nice. It being sunny and 35 degrees outside makes it not really feel like Christmas at all though.

New Year was an altogether different kettle of fish, we finished work at 8pm on New Years eve and promised to head to the Bagingarra Tavern for a few drinks which we did, but as you get into rounds with people it becomes harder and harder to leave, then it's 11.45pm and you think you might as well stay and see the New Year in, then a few beers, sambucas, slippery nipples, absinthe and champagnes later it's 1.30am and Kate has to be up at 5am to start work at 6 cooking greasy fry-ups for the very people who'd been feeding her alcohol the night before - ouch! As I said we got home at half one and I put my head down went out like a light and promptly got up again to be sick - twice! The main reason (well one reason) being, that Kate was clever enough to realise she had to be up early so kept saying "No I won't have that shot, I've got to be up early, give it to Rich!" (of course I was lapping up the free drinks at the time) Boy, did I regret it????? To my credit I managed to get up and start on time at 8am and last through till 1pm, although it was a struggle I can tell you. Thankfully everyone else must have been in a similar state cos it wasn't busy and the guy replacing me at 1pm looked worse then I did and he'd only just got up! A Christmas and New Year not to be forgotten in a hurry!

So that was Bagingarra, another unforgettable experience, something totally out of our comfort zone but good fun all the same. We're now back in Perth for a couple of frantic days before heading to the South West and onto more adventures, we now only have 4 weeks left in Australia (scary) and still so much to see and do - to the time machine!

Oh, before I leave you, the title of this post refers to the famous 'Badgi' burger and as its the most common question I was asked at work was (well apart from 'What brings a Pom to a little town like this?' or 'What's the score in the Ashes?')......

Customer: What's in a Badgi Burger?

Rich:A Badgi is a Homemade Hamburger Pattie, Bacon, Egg, Cheese, Onion, BBQ Sauce and salad if you'd like.

Customer: Sold.

So if you'd like one, we'll be opening our own 'Badgi' joint when we arrive home (and Kates a mean Badgi burger chef) so place your orders now ........ Having said that we can't guarantee an exact replica 'Badgi Burger' cos the boss was very secretive about his hamburger recipe that even his wife didn't know it - and she's the co-owner!

Does that fill in the last 7 weeks for ya?

Take care

Rich and Kate