The initial shock of being back in a city slowly wore off. We found ourselves a room for the night in one of the many many backpacker places in Northbridge (it was a dump and horrendously overpriced, but we were too knackered to worry about it overly), extracted what we would need for the evening from the camper and then began the gradual process of re-urbanising ourselves: showers, the trimming of fringe (Rainnie) and beard (me), putting on a wash, getting changed into "presentable" clothes.

It was Friday night, and I had decided to put on my dancing shoes and celebrate the end of our trip. But we were so knackered that we accidentally fell asleep! An hour later, I awoke extremely groggy and spent a little while rousing Rainnie from her slumber. We pushed on through the thick heads, had a cheeky cider to start the evening, and headed out to the Belgian Beer Cafe for a swift one. We just got there before they started closing up! It was eleven o'clock.

Our next port of call was a cavernous bar with a number of different rooms and dancefloors called the Court. At one point we found ourselves talking to a very very scary older lady. Rainnie felt honour-bound to remain in conversation with her, but she was SCARY so I finally convinced Rainnie to do a runner. We pretended to go to the toilet, then left quick-sharp! From the Court we went to Connections, a cheesy nightclub near our backpackers. But somehow we managed not to get to bed until four a.m. so it can't have been all that bad...

On Saturday morning we paid a heavy price for the excesses of the night before. Not only had we drunk a skinful, but also I had to get up at eight o'clock to renew the parking ticket on the van! And again at nine o'clock. And at ten. But then I realised we could't put off the inevitable any longer: it was time to Return The Campervan.

But first we had to check out. The geezer in the backpackers kindly let us use one of the common rooms to organise our luggage. Oh my God! The pile of our belongings was frighteningly huge. And it all had to fit back into two pieces of luggage!! Even random strangers were gasping at the enormity of our packing task. But somehow we managed.

Unfortunately, the packing sapped Rainnie of any remaining energy she had for the day. She was apologetic but it was clear to me that she was in such a bad way, she wouldn't be able to help me clean the van. So I did all of that, whilst she held her head in the vicinity of a bucket.

From the rental return station (handily close by in Northbridge) we took a cab to a nearby doctor. Rainnie was really in a bad way. The doctor sent us to the hospital for blood tests, fearing that Rainnie had hepatitis! And so we spent the best part of Saturday afternoon in hospital, Rainnie in various emergency beds and me - courtesy of administrative cock-up - in the waiting area, wondering what the hell was going on.

Oh well, on the positive side it gave me the chance to start writing up the three-week trip round NT and WA (Rainnie's laptop was in her bag with me). But when my head had cleared a bit I realised I should ask for an update at the front desk. They then told me "oh yes, of course you can go through to see her, but we don't bother calling up individual visitors". So how am I supposed to know I can go through? Argh!

By about five o'clock Rainnie was sufficiently rehydrated to be allowed to leave the hospital. We got a taxi into town, and the driver was a very entertaining and friendly chap from Kenya who had previously lived in Melbourne. And, as everyone knows, in Melbourne it's ALL ABOUT coffee, so Rainnie and he spent a good five minutes discussing the merits of various Melbourne coffee bars, and he bemoaned the fact that you just can't get a decent coffee anywhere in Perth!

At least I could tell from this exchange that Rainnie was feeling better... So we went to have a little lie down in a park in the centre of Northbridge, where they'd put up a huge widescreen TV and were showing bizarre cartoons. Then we indulged in a spot of internetting back at the backpackers.

We had a last bite to eat together at a Vietnamese place, and I had the best pho (beef noodle soup) I think I've ever had outside of Vietnam. Oh my God it was good! (It might just have had something to do with the fact that this was the first time in three weeks that I'd eaten meat, but I like to think that it was more about simply how well prepared it was and how fresh the ingredients were.)

We followed this delicious meal with a dismal coffee up the road, and then it was time for me to bid farewell to my travelling companion of the last three weeks. Rainnie flew home to Melbourne that night.

But I had a few more days in Perth, and they started about five minutes after Rainnie jumped into her airport taxi: I met up with Blake, a chap I met at Foggy's wedding in Northern Ireland in March. He owns a gorgeous flat right in the middle of Northbridge that he rents out, and handily it was empty from Saturday for a few days, so I moved in there straight away and then we had a few beers and a catch-up.

The plan for Sunday was delightful. Blake had gathered a few mates together and we did a little bit of a winery tour in the Swan River Valley, just north of Perth. Blake picked me up in the morning, then we swung by his friend Brett's house to pick him up as well. The three of us drove to the Duckstein Brewery, a German beergarden and brewhouse, where we met up with Blake's friends Holger & Melanie (a German couple) and Chrissie & Cherry.

The food was enormous and the beer was pretty good. But deary me the prices! It was hard to see how much they were getting away with charging for bog-standard German fare. I mean, it hurts my feelings to pay the equivalent of €20 for a schnitzel that I could buy in Munich for maybe €8! Ah well, but here we were on the other side of the planet, so I guess it had rarity value.

After the brewery we went to a couple of wineries. They have a great system here: you pay two dollars and get to taste six or seven wines. So there's no guilt-driven pressure on you to buy any wine at all, like there might be if you were getting all your tastes for free. At the first winery, the guy was a bit boring, but at the second one the woman we had was hysterically funny. She must have been eighty years old, but she was all dolled up (lippy, the works) and she had SUCH banter it was hilarious!

We went our separate ways after that winery, Blake Brett & I back to Brett's, where his wife gave us delicious cupcakes. Then Blake & I drove back into the city, left the car at his place and walked up to Mount Lawley for a bite to eat at a Greek place. We followed this with one of Perth's best coffees (according to Lonely Planet - but then again, how could I ever trust a coffee recommendation from that book again?) but I reckon Rainnie wouldn't have rated it.

We walked back to Northbridge and Blake drove home to his place in the suburbs, whilst I luxuriated in his exceptionally well-appointed place in town. Ah! to have so much space to myself, after 21 days sharing a campervan! It was exquisite.

So, it's Thursday, we're in Monkey Mia. How else to start the day than by watching dolphins getting fed?

There was quite a large crowd of people on the beach down by the jetty to enjoy this daily spectacle: dolphins coming in from the wild to interact with humans and get a free meal. To be fair to the organisers, they don't feed just any dolphin. The recipients of food are all descendants of the original group of dolphins that were first fed some thirty years ago.

It was wonderful to see dolphins so up-close and personal. Normally you only ever see glimpse them from on board a ship, or at best when they're swimming past you at high speed. This was a real treat - although it would have been even more amazing to swim with them rather than looking on whilst standing in a big long line on the sand.

After the dolphin feeding we went along to the meeting place for our Aboriginal walk. The guy taking us on the walk used to be a famous Australian Rules footballer - and he is a well-built man in his thirties with a distinct aura about him. Now he is an evangelist for Aboriginal-owned and -organised tourism, working closely with indigenous communities to ensure that their wishes are respected.

The walk he took us on brought us into close contact with Australian plants, animals and soil in a completely new way for me. It was fascinating to hear him talk about traditional ways, bush tucker (the plants you can eat that grow wild here, as opposed to food plants imported by European settlers), and the intimate relationship that Aboriginal people have with their environment. It really makes you look at the world around you with different eyes.

We left Monkey Mia and headed back to the mainland, but with one last stop at Hamelin Pool to see the stromatolites, which are bizarre communities of bacteria that have existed for over three billion years. They look like rocks, but they're alive! They too depend on the hypersalinity of the waters of Shark Bay, a factor (along with the biodiversity) that was decisive in this whole area's elevation to World Heritage status.

And, sure enough, once we left the vicinity of Shark Bay, the plants and trees either side of the road seemed somehow less vibrant and full of energy. It was almost unpleasant to get slowly sucked back in to the "normal" Australia again after a few days enjoying the richness of Shark Bay and Monkey Mia.

We drove on south, eventually reaching a new area of lush vegetation in the form of the Kalbarri National Park, famed for its banksia trees and other flowering bushes. In fact, it was quite bizarre to find ourselves driving along and suddenly to notice that the scenery had undergone another colossal change. Where there had been scrub, now there were huge stands of trees. Where there had been two colours: ochre and dusty green, now there were little flowers in every hue.

We had a sad encounter with a very recently deceased emu that blocked our half of the highway. It was tragic to see this proud bird - whose cousins we had so recently played with in Exmouth - sprawled across the tarmac, still bleeding from its fatal car impact wounds.

We left the main highway to head to the coast and had a bite to eat at the small town of Kalbarri, enjoying the spectacular inlet there, with foaming waves crashing over a submerged rock and beaches stretching to either side. Then, as we headed back inland, we stopped to enjoy the sunset in a landscape that felt decidedly European: fields, fences, farms, and a general lack of the sense of vastness that had accompanied us pretty much all the way from Darwin.

We could tell we were nearing the end of our trip, but we had a few more excitements ahead of us yet.

Relatively quickly, the pastoral idyll we found ourselves in gave way to a briefly forgotten but sadly all-too-familiar dystopia of multi-lane highways, garish lights and that bane of modern life, traffic. The weather turned even windier as well, which made it all the more scary when huge road trains decided to overtake us on roads that were much narrower than they had been further north.

We drove right past Geraldton, the first town of any size we'd seen since, well, Darwin to be honest. Instead we pressed on further south, deciding to leave the main highway again and head coastwards towards Jurien Bay. We found ourselves a secluded parking spot off the road and hunkered down for the night under our sleeping bags, the wind once again howling and keeping the van very cold.

It was Friday, and for once I was awake a little before Rainnie. I snuck outside to have a little walk around. We had guessed that it might be pretty round here, but in fact it was a beautiful spot! Quite by chance we had parked at the top of some cliffs that looked down over a delightful little bay, its pristine beach spread at my feet as I contemplated the tumble of rocks & scrubby plants that formed a promontory before me, resplendent in the early morning sun.

We had breakfast just at the very top of the cliffs, then drove to the small town of Green Head where Rainnie treated herself to a cold shower and I decided I wasn't smelly enough to undergo that ordeal. The beach at Green Head was beautiful, as indeed it was all through that part of the world. We stopped slightly inland from there at a big viewing point and enjoyed a panorama over inland salt pans and a huge river valley.

Our next stop was at Jurien Bay. Can I just say that the Lonely Planet is LYING when it says you can get a decent coffee in that town. You SO can't. It was revolting. I actually honestly couldn't even drink more than one sip. I can't remember the last time I've left a food or drink item I've ordered standing, but I had to here. Gross!

We drove back inland a little way to the Pinnacles desert, part of Nambung National Park. The pinnacles are a bizarre sandstone formation, the genesis of which scientists have yet to agree on, made up of thousands of stalagmites standing singly or in groups in the middle of the desert. It's like nothing you've ever seen before.

They've built a huge new visitor centre which has lots of info on the local fauna & flora as well as the rocks, but the best thing about our visit here was that they've also laid on a track that you can drive on which takes you through the heart of the pinnacles themselves. Kind of like a safari park, only with rock instead of lions.

As we headed back to the highway, we passed huge pure white sand dunes. At the highway, we rescued a blue-tongue lizard from certain death in the middle of the road. Or, to be more exact, certain death beneath our tyres: the silly thing just froze in the road and it was lucky that it was between our wheels because we couldn't break fast enough!

Then we started the final stretch of our journey, heading through the increasingly European-looking countryside, past windfarms, the traffic steadily getting heavier. And then suddenly we were on the main highway to Perth: traffic jams, roadworks, road rage, all the joys of big-city living.

It took bloody ages to get as far as Perth's ring road. At least we had nice vineyards on either side of the road to enjoy looking at as we sat in the traffic jam while lorries hurtled past us in the other direction. When we reached Perth, thankfully Rainnie knew the area of town we should head for to find accommodation, and I successfully navigated us between, under and onto various flyovers and other scary roads.

There we were: smelly us in our skanky clothes, our dusty campervan parked up on a city street, and people walking past us in suits and ties. Never in my life have I felt so out of place. And me, a city boy from London! It's amazing how just three weeks in the bush had changed me. The mark of a fantastic trip, methinks.