The Hinterland, Brisbane.

We spent 3 nights out in the rainforest. The lodge was in the middle of nowhere. It was over 30km to the next town, along a windy country road, so the car wasn't put to much use there. We did walk quite a lot though. On our first day we did a short 4km walk to Python Rock (luckily no pythons to be seen). It had a lookout at the end of the track with fantastic views over the deep valley and a waterfall. Because it had been raining there was a rainbow across the falls. Nice!

We tried a longer walk the next day through more of the rainforest and across a creek. That was about 12km and it helped to prepare us for a monster walk of 18km the final day. This was not an easy one as the paths were so muddy, narrow in places and in several places trees had fallen across the path so there was some scrambling involved. There were also about 8 river crossings all of them more tricky than the previous day. The water was often quite deep as there'd been heavy rain each night and the rocks very slippery. We didn't fancy taking off our boots and socks to wade through as there were loads of leaches!! They kept attaching themselves to our boots and trousers so we had to keep flicking them off - much easier than getting them off skin, I'm sure.

Today we headed back via the coast road to Brisbane, going through such delightful places as Surfer's Paradise. Yes, it sounds lovely but it's a cross between Las Vegas and Ayia Napa and full of schoolies looking for the nearest party. Eughh! Too old for that. We drove straight through.

Our time in Oz has been great. It was so nice to catch up with the old friends back in Sydney and Melbourne. It also gave us chance to see parts of Oz neither of us have been to and for Colin to revisit some places he hadn't been to for many years.

Tomorrow we fly out of Australia for our final leg of the world trip in Phuket, Thailand. We have about 4 days to fully chill out (not that we aren't chilled already) and try to get tans before returning to cold, wet England and, of course, work. The upside, however, is that we get to see all of you again - and bore you with hours of travel stories!