Ah! The Indian Ocean! What a sea-change (ouch pun!) from the world of dry, hot, ochre hills and spiky plants that we had been travelling through for the last week.

Cable Beach by day was even more fabulous than Cable Beach by night. We had an early-morning swim, watching a group of enthusiastic housewives doing aerobics at the top of the stairs down to the beach, then a spot of breakfast. Our next task was to find a campsite for the night (having slept sort-of illegally in the car park that night). We picked a spot in a nearby site, then cleaned the van of all its desert skankiness and did a big wash of our now-brown clothes.

Broome is smallish and quaint, with a long and colourful history: it started out as a pearling station, with dark stories of slavery, but has since become a prime tourist destination. (Yes, I spent an hour in the town's local history museum.) It's laid-back and cruisy. And it's growing fast. It was amazing to see how many houses are being built in behind the seashore. But I have to admit I didn't warm to the town really. It does however have some great beaches!

One of the highlights of Broome is Matso's Brewery, which does some delicious beers with all sorts of flavours. Our favourites were the mango wheat beer, the chili lager and the ginger beer. You can also buy them in bottles to take away, which makes them perfect as a drink to watch the sun set with. And boy were the sunsets huge!

Just outside Broome is Gantheaume Point, a bit of land that juts out into the sea opposite Cable Beach. The whole coast is made up of outlandishly bizarre rock formations, and you get to see how the bright red soil of this part of the world competes with the bright white of the sand to outshine the bright blue of the sea. Rainnie & I each took hundreds of photos, because everywhere you turned you saw an even more incredible chunk of multicoloured rock or a more astonishing juxtaposition of colours. Wow!

The road up to Gantheaume Point is 4WD-only, but we risked it anyway with the van; Rainnie had been here ten years ago in a VW Combi, so she knew it was passable. I was driving, and I totally didn't know where to stop because I was too busy concentrating on the ruts and drifts in the sandy track to see the sign. So in fact we went far too far up this dodgy road, and turned around once it started to get really difficult to drive on. We really didn't want to get stranded in a place that might invalidate our insurance...

After exploring the rocks in the intense heat for a few hours (we both of us caught plenty of sun that day; in fact Rainnie was driven to comment that evening "Oh my God my cleavage is on fire") we drove on out of town to visit the port of Broome. Here we walked right out on the long jetty, with people fishing off it all along and seagulls circling, then stopped at an unexpectedly nice-looking cafe back on land. I had grilled king prawns, thinking this might be the kind of place that would have amazing seafood, but I was a little underwhelmed.

We called in at McDonald's to use their free wi-fi (okay it's not free because you're expected to make a purchase; but 50 cents for an ice cream isn't too bad) before driving around town to find a spot where we might get away with camping for free. We ended up right on Town Beach, which was thankfully deserted. We took showers on the beach (I even dared to go naked because I could hardly see the nearest people and it was dark after all) and then turned in.

On Wednesday morning we were woken by a cloud of flies that got in to the van through the open side door (we hadn't bothered with opening the back of the van and putting the mozzie net across because we didn't want to draw attention to ourselves in the carpark, but we needed some air). The flies really are persistent in Australia. They want to land up your nose, on your eyeball, pretty much everywhere, the little bastards. At times I craved an Aussie hat with corks on...

We had a morning swim at Town Beach, naturally bringing our cameras down to the water's edge with us to take some beach photos. And then we got carried away in conversation to the extent that we totally didn't notice how far the tide had come in. Then Rainnie suddenly jumped up out of the water and ran full tilt back up to the sand, because she happened to see that waves were lapping at her camera case! Thankfully she got it out of the water just in time, but it was a close one!

Then we had breakfast outside the van, and it was the turn of the gulls to swarm around us like, well, like the flies had earlier on. I made the mistake of dropping a piece of apple on the floor, and it only took one enterprising gull to notice this for a whole squadron of them to come shrieking to our feet.

It was time to bid farewell to the coast for a little while and take the highway inland heading south then west. The countryside was full of trees and then suddenly empty of trees. Weird. And the wind! Oh my goodness, we were fighting to keep the van on the road most of the time, wrestling with the steering wheel. No wonder, when you consider how high and how square the van is. But it meant we were burning through petrol.

In fact, we very nearly had a huge disaster: petrol stations are quite far apart in this part of the world, so it's always important to fill up when you can. But with the wind we really couldn't help the fact that we were running literally on empty (it was really full-on, with the little red indicator light shouting at you as well as the needle under E) for THIRTY KILOMETRES! If we had run out, we would have been stuck in an inferno of treeless wasteland. Maybe a car would have come past. But then again maybe not. There isn't much traffic up here.

But we were very lucky and made it to Sandfire, a petrol station with a small roadhouse attached. And I was doubly lucky because we got there just in time for me to be able to call Charlie at home before he had to go to school and wish him a happy birthday. Of course, there was no mobile signal, but the petrol station had a payphone that was working. Phew!

Our next stop was on Eighty Mile Beach. This is a mind-blowingly enormous stretch of coastline that has millions of identical little flower-shaped shells lying atop superfine squelchy grey sand. It's also totally weird because the beach shelves so gently into the water that you can't actually tell where the land ends and the sea starts.

You start at the sand dunes and walk for maybe a kilometre out towards the sea, shells crunching underfoot, and where at first your feet are just wet underneath, slowly slowly the sand becomes softer, then there you cause little ripples in the skin of water over the beach, then there are slightly bigger pencils of water here and there, then you're walking over a corrugated surface of sandy channels, then you're mesmerised by the shifting reflections of sun and sand all around you, and then it's up around your ankles but you didn't notice.

It was windy as, of course, which masked the heat. But by the time we'd walked back on land I realised I was feeling rather sunstruck. Rainnie was a star and cooked me some lunch while I lay down in the shade of the van feeling helpless. The satay tofu revived me very effectively however, and soon we were back on the main road (Rainnie drove the 12km of dirt track to the beach and back at an impressive speed, the van juddering less than it would have had we been going slower because the wheels weren't really going down again before the next bump, so it was more like a hovercraft than a campervan).

We drove on through the evening until we reached Port Hedland, a very industrial town with a huge docks for shipping coal. Rainnie remembered there being a cute little beach somewhere near the centre of town where we could camp for the night. We found it eventually. It's called Pretty Pool. Aah! It being pitch black again, of course, we couldn't actually see if there's a pretty pool there, so we just parked up and had some dinner, then slept soundly with the sea breeze to cool us.

One of the coolest things about the camping ground at Katherine Gorge is that it is overrun with kangaroos!!! Oh yes, we had our first close encounter with Aussie wildlife whilst setting up for the evening. And in the night the place was veritably overrun with the little cuties!

So that evening I managed to rustle up a passable risotto on the small cooker in the van, and we washed it down with red wine before turning in. I was woken the next morning by the sound of innumerable strange birds calling to one another in the high tree canopy above our heads. Living in a campervan really reconnects you with life's natural rhythms. Early to bed, early to rise, and all that. It's impossible to sleep much after sunrise - and that's without factoring in all the wild animals loudly going about their business.

We did a boat tour of some of the gorges along the Katherine river. The scenery is spectacular! And there are Aboriginal cave paintings to be seen as well as natural beauty of the rocky sides of the gorges. It was fabulous weather, with barely a cloud in the sky. I look forward to looking at all the photos I took.

Back at the camp ground, we had one last swim in the marvellous pool (and I managed to graze my knuckles on the floor of the pool; they're STILL not completely healed, which is pretty bizarre I think) before breaking camp and making our way back to the town of Katherine. There we had a bit of housekeeping to do, in terms of shopping and getting Rainnie's laptop PC working. Even though the coffee shop in Katherine had the added bonus of wireless internet connectivity, it took us a good few hours to get the lappie working, including a manual uninstall of Microsoft Office. Yuk. The kid in the computer shop was useless too. Well, maybe that's what you get for dropping out of school at the age of 13.

We spent the night down near the hot springs that are just outside of town. There were millions of flying foxes there in the trees; I haven't seen such a spectacle as their mass departure at sunset since India. They'd actually started flying before the sun set, while we were still driving, and one managed to fly smack bang into the roof of the campervan! So much for echo location...

There were some unsavoury types camping near us (one guy who went into the loos just before me washed up a very suspicious looking spoon) so we kept to ourselves that night. Also, it wasn't an official camp ground, so we hoped we wouldn't get moved on by a ranger. We were lucky that night and left after a spot of breakfast the next morning.

So it was Saturday already! We had a huge long drive from Katherine heading south, past hundreds of Gaudi-esque termite mounds, down the valley of the Victoria river and through the Gregory National Park (which has amazing table mountains). The scenery was breathtaking!

We stopped for lunch at a tiny town called Timber Creek. It was baking hot and there was barely a whisper of breeze, but we found some respite from the sun in the shade of a huge boab tree that stood outside the 100-year-old local police station (which is now a museum). The building was surprising because it really wasn't very different at all from the buildings you still see all over the Outback. I'm guessing the newer ones have a toilet though.

After lunch we drove through the hot, dry landscape, marvelling at all the boabs we could see. There was one that was just enormous, so we stopped to take some pictures. And then we drove some more. And some more. And some more. And a bit more. You get the picture. It was all gorgeous, but it's difficult to describe the slightly hypnotic effect of driving through the bush.

We eventually reached the border with Western Australia, where we realised that we hadn't really thought about the inter-state quarantine regulations very hard. Basically, we had the choice of throwing away all our fruit & vegetables, or cooking everything up; cooked food is no issue, but raw stuff isn't allowed. Rainnie was feeling decidedly knackered with the heat and the driving, but I just couldn't bear to see all our food go to waste, so I cooked up about a week's worth of veggies while Rainnie squeezed all our remaining oranges into a juice box (which we got away with tee hee).

The unexpected delay at the border pretty much ate up all the two-and-a-half hour time difference between NT and WA. Now THAT was weird! I don't think I've ever driven a car across a time zone border before. We carried on driving, and soon reached the outskirts of Kununarra, a lush and prosperous town at the centre of a huge irrigation project from the 1960s. We were just in time to watch the sun set over the lake at the edge of town. It was a beautiful purple sunset, and with the leaves of the water lilies in the lake it felt like standing in a Monet painting.

The campsite we found was nice enough, but frustrating because we tried site after sit but the electrics just wouldn't work! Eventually we figured out that it was in fact the circuit breaker behind the driver's seat that was to blame for our travails. So we just had a nice swim in the pool (where Rainnie kindly taught me how to dive into water; I'm just not a water baby), a nice shower, a bite to eat, and turned in.

As if Saturday's drive hadn't been enough for us, we decided on Sunday to do a mad desert dash. We had to stay on the sealed roads sadly, as our campervan was only two wheel drive, so we couldn't go via the Gibb River Road through the heart of the Kimberley Mountains. Instead, we followed the main road south and then west, keeping the mountains to our right and heading slowly but surely towards the coast.

It was the hottest day of the trip. Even the campervan engine started to feel the heat; we were worried at one point that we would be stuck in the middle of this godforsaken desert landscape with an overheated engine, but luckily the fan kicked in each time the needle on the temperature gauge got scary.

Once again, the landscape's slow evolution from one vegetation type to another proved hypnotic. But now we were getting animals added into the mix. There were cows EVERYWHERE! Australia is clearly too big and sparsely populated to have fences across it all over the place; the consequence is that livestock roam free and you have to watch out if you're using the roads.

Our first stop after Kununarra was at Halls Creek, a town which is notable mainly for being somewhere to stop after Kununarra to get fuel. We reached it in the worst heat of the day, and thankfully there was a green open space in the centre of the one road that constitutes this township where we could stop to have a bite to eat. We also discovered Halls Creek's hidden charm: a public toilet that sings to you, gives you a precise dose of toilet paper, and won't let you out again until you've washed your hands!

Our next stop, after a brief pause to gather wonderful quartz stones from the side of the road at a particularly alluring side-of-the-road parking area and an even briefer pause to have my driving licence checked by a passing police patrol, was at Fitzroy Crossing. The sun was just setting as we pulled into the petrol station (or servo, as they call them here) - a fact that strongly improved my impression of the town, hiding its worst uglinesses as it did in a dreamy wash of pinks, purples and (most importantly) shadow.

From there on, the drive was a little bit cooler. The desert air was still hot as it rushed over our arms (and the passenger's feet stuck out of the side window) but it wasn't being superheated by that bloody big yellow thing in the sky any more. It was our first long stint of night driving, and we had some excellent "road train" experiences: these are big articulated lorries that can have up to five trailers hooked onto one cab. They're monsters!

At one point as we headed west, we found ourselves driving through a stand of eucalyptus that smelled just delightful. It was like driving through a cough sweet! We pulled up on the forecourt of a small roadhouse just after this forest to swap drivers, and soon found ourselves surrounded by a press of cattle. It might have been a cute scene by day, but in the black of night there was something sinister about this bovine blanket that smothered our campervan. We drove away as soon as we could, and on into the inky black yonder, the only light thousands of diamond sparkles in the sky.

We were knackered, but we had a goal: THE OCEAN! Finally, finally, we reached Broome and headed straight for Cable Beach, an expanse of fine white sand just to the north of town. By this time every single surface in the van - the dashboard, the steering wheel, the windows, the water bottles, our arms & legs - was coated in a slick of sun cream mixed with desert dust. It was really quite repellent. The only thing for it was a midnight swim under the stars, with an exfoliating wash of sandy seawater to strip away the ickyness of the day. And then we slept in a dark corner of the car park, refreshed and relieved.