So, what does one do when one is sitting in the waiting room of the emergency department of a hospital in Perth? The answer on this occasion is: start writing up my blog for the monster three-week trip around the north and west of Australia that has just ended. Rainnie is ill - hopefully nothing too serious - and I'm using her laptop.

It's a good job I've taken notes of everything we've done as we went along. There is simply no way I could write down all that we've experienced in these last 21 days without an aide memoire. We've done SO MUCH! So let me scrabble about in my bag for a moment and retrieve my little diary book thing...

Let's start where I left off, with the flight down from Sydney to Melbourne. It was late leaving, which was a bit shite, and they charged me an obscene amount of money for fully 2kg of excess baggage, which was a lot shite, especially as it was a bottle of duty free that I wasn't allowed to take on as hand luggage in these ludicrous "if there are no liquids in your bag you won't be blown up by terrorists" times we live in. But enough ranting.

Rainnie picked me up from Tullamarine airport and we had a joyous meeting. I haven't seen Rainnie since we were diving together in the Philippines two years ago. How lovely it was to have her once again before me!!

We drove to hers, dumped my bags in her room, and then got ready to head out again. We cycled to the Little Creatures brewhouse on Brunswick Street in Fitzroy and met up with her friends Ros & Jess and their brother who was down visiting from Brisbane.

It was great cycling in Melbourne. The weather was fine and warm, the bike path along the Merri Creek (which flows past Rainnie's house) pleasant, and the view of Melbourne's CBD skyline was delicious! Once we reached the brewhouse I quickly changed into a fresh teeshirt round the corner. We proceeded to drink ourselves silly and eat some slightly disappointingly small but otherwise tasty snacks, ending the evening down the road in a funky cocktail bar.

Sunday morning was sore head central, but at least we had most of the day to recover and get ready for our Big Trip. We headed down Lygon Street for a delicious breakfast of poached eggs, Persian feta, beetroot chutney and scrummy avocado. Then we did a spot of shopping & whatnot in town - including for me a quick trip to Carlton to see my old house aaah!

That afternoon we packed our bags and had a final fish & chips session with Rainnie's housemates Leah & Bron before setting off for our Big Trip. And so I come to the flight up from Melbourne to Darwin. Leah was kind enough to bring us out to the airport in her vintage VW Golf, and we checked in without problems. A coffee and a water later, we were on board our plane and could settle in for the three-hour flight.

The last time I'd been to Darwin airport, we'd had to do an emergency landing on the way from Hong Kong to Sydney to let someone off who'd had a heart attack. This visit was much less stressful. Even though it was already midnight, the heat was like a brick wall as we left the terminal building and queued up for a taxi. I was back in the tropics again, after only having just left them behind me on Phuket!

Our room in the backpacker hostel was pokey and not really very nice, but it was only for a night so we didn't care. And it did offer us shelter from the enormous thunderstorm that passed over us about five minutes after we got there! There was a swimming pool but it didn't look too inviting; I'm not sure I've ever seen water that particular shade of grey in a public swimming facility before...

The next day we headed out to find a coffee and then collected our campervan, our home for the next three weeks. There was a certain amount of paperwork and faffing but an hour later we were on the road. We went back for our luggage and then parked up outside, so we could walk down to the harbour.

It turned into a monster walk in the heat, and we were both pretty bowled over by the tropical temperatures. A nice lady in a big car - she was checking bee traps set by the customs officials in the area around the port, to make sure no evil species had arrived on a passing ship - gave us a lift from the shitty end of the harbour where we'd ended up (it's a construction site at the moment) round to the nice end. There we treated ourselves to a Thai meal because we were feeling so tropical.

We walked back into town, past the new artifiicial lagoon (a bit like the one in Cairns), and had another coffee before doing a spot of shopping for our trip. Then we spent ages trying to find a campsite for the night. All the ones that were marked on the "Welcome to Darwin" brochure we got in the airport seemed to be nonexistent, but eventually we found one out past the airport. It turned out to be lovely, with a fabulous swimming pool, spotlessly clean gas barbecues and great facilities.

On Tuesday we drove back into Darwin to do some more shopping, including a little FM radio transmitter for my iPod so we could listen to tunes on the van's radio. We also went to a huge Chinese supermarket outside town to pick up supplies and a giant chopper (the utensils provided with the can left much to be desired). One final stop at a hardware store to buy and then fit mosquito screens to the van's windows - can you believe they gave us a van that didn't have mozzie screens! - and then we headed out on our road trip.

And boy, were we glad we'd bought the iPod transmitter thing! We turned the radio on as we left Darwin, and found ourselves listening to some weirdy religious broadcast, with some guy going on about how all things fade away but only God remains. The message is conventional enough, but the guy chose the coolest list of false permanencies: "...the pyramids of Egypt, the Mona Lisa, Andre Agassi..." - no, really! Topical, okay, but OH PUR-LEEEEAZE!

Our first destination was Litchfield National Park, where we visited huge termite mounds before parking up near the Buley Rockholes. These are lovely little natural swimming holes. We weren't the only ones enjoying the refreshing waters either: a lizard actually jumped in and swam with us! After washing the day's dust off ourselves we were ready for a bite to eat, so we headed back to the van, lit a fire, and cooked up a big veggie barbie which we washed down with cider. Yum!

A kangaroo came and watched us eat, and birds swooped down to catch the flies that had gathered around us. Then the sun set over the parched landscape of eucalyptus trees and scrub, and soon we were enveloped in a stunning night sky, its velvety blackness studded with pinpricks of diamond.

On Wednesday we had a fabulous morning swim in one of the bigger Buley Rockholes (where Rainnie started teaching me how to dive into water - because I'm crap and I can't) and then walked on downstream to the Florence Falls. Oh boy! What an incredible place! A huge waterfall cascading down into a huge pool, the water crystal clear and full of big fat fish. There weren't even too many other tourists there at that time of the day, so we could swim and splash and enjoy ourselves to the full.

We cadged a lift back to our van off the driver of a small tour bus who had just brought his group to the falls. This was much preferable to the stinging heat of the tropical sun, especially now that it was even higher in the sky than when we had set out that morning. Back at the van, we packed up and set off to see some more of the National Park.

On our way to Wangi Falls we found a section of scrubland right by the road on fire! Of course, fire is a natural part of the life cycle of the plants around here, so there was no panic or fire engines or such. We just took some pictures and moved on. After a swim at Wangi Falls (where the water was really hot) we drove past the Tolmer Falls, where we had spectacular views over the eucalyptus forest that stretched in all directions to the horizon. Then we headed out of the park and south on the Stuart Highway.

We had our first panic of the trip that evening, when we discovered how unreliable the petrol gauge on the van is. It seemed fine for a long time, then suddenly started dropping at an alarming speed - and we were miles from the next petrol station! We were lucky though and made it to a roadhouse with fuel, so we weren't stranded at the side of the highway, with no mobile phone reception and almost no passing traffic. It was a lesson to me on remoteness, which as a European is not a concept I have much direct experience of.

We took a road off the main highway to the Douglas Daly Hot Springs, which had been recommended to us as a good place to visit by the lady sat next to Rainnie on the plane up from Melbourne. The sun was already down and my second lesson in remoteness started to come out of the bush: wildlife. Luckily for me, Rainnie is incredibly good at spotting kangaroos (and sheep, goats, emus, cows, lizards, snakes and rabbits - but I'm getting ahead of myself) at the side of the road, so we didn't have any collisions, even when the tarmac ran out and the road became not much more than a path beaten into the red earth.

And no sooner had we parked up in the camp ground - a very spartan affair, with no more than a toilet block and some bins - than another huge tropical thunderstorm engulfed us. The ground turned into a lake, as all the rainwater failed to soak in at once, and it looked as though we were in the middle of a mudslide. But soon the storm subsided and maybe an hour later all the water had disappeared. Incredible.

On Thursday morning we went to have a look at the hot springs, and discovered that they are bloody hot! There was no way we could swim in the water, even though the hot spring itself flowed into a (cold) river, because this being dry season the level of the river was far too low to compensate. And, to be honest, even if we had been physically able to swim there, I wouldn't have wanted to because the whole place stank with the sulphurous fumes associated with the spring, and the sandy muddy soil was like glue. On the plus side though, I found a frog in the shower when I was trying to get the mud off my feet.

We left the Douglas Daly Hot Springs and headed to the Edith falls further south. The falls aren't huge but the lake at their foot is enormous - and great for swimming in. We had a picnic there after our swim and then drove to Katherine. It's the first town of any size since Darwin, but it's really not much more than a main drag with some supermarkets, some petrol stations, and a few shops. Thankfully there was a decent coffee shop there, so we had a soy latte and then made our way up to the Katherine Gorge, which lies in Nitmiluk National Park.

The campsite at Katherine Gorge is fantastic, with another marvellous swimming pool like the one outside Darwin. We did our first load of washing there, and made the discovery that Australian desert dirt doesn't really wash out. Ah well, I can just pretend my white teeshirts are deliberately tie-dyed or something... I had bought a tent in Katherine, because it was pretty cramped and too stuffy in the van for me & Rainnie to sleep well, and Rainnie proceeded to use the tent for the rest of the trip (except where we couldn't put it up).