Everywhere you go and everything you do they want to take your photo. They take it, sometimes without your permission, and, by the time you've got back from whatever it was you were doing, they have it there for you ($30).

Sometimes in a souvenir pack ($60).

And sometimes with your photo in the middle of a souvenir collectors' item plate of the sort your Gran used to have with a West Island Terrier or Charles and Di. ($200 - but that was in Hong Kong, so that's really only about £15).

I'm not really sure why they do it with the Jet Boat...



Because you don't get a photo of you actually speeding round the harbour, pulling sharp 360° spins, bouncing over the wakes of the ubiquitous ferries, squinting to see what's happening as the needle-sharp spray makes tiny holes in your corneas and exfoliates your face revealing your skull, squelching uncomfortably from side to side as the water on your seat penentrates both layers of below-the-waist clothing...

What you actually get is a photo of you standing on the jetty in a massive, shapeless red-tent kagoule (waterproof in name only). They don't even put the boat or the Bridge in the background, both of which, as you can see from above, would be possible.

So I didn't buy them.

But I did go on the boat!

(Damn! How will I prove it without the photo...)

Although you can see the two most famous landmarks of Sydney really clearly from many different angles around the harbour, it's increasingly difficult to see either of them the further you move south into the CBD (Cental Business District, as City Centres are known over here...)

The Bridge gradually disappears between high-rise (and in some cases, quite low-rise) buildings...



...and the Sydney Tower, which boasts Sydney's Best Views, only manages to squeeze the Opera House in between a couple of skyscrapers...



But Mrs Macquarie had the right idea...

Mrs Macquarie was the wife of Major-General Lachlan Macquarie, Governor of New South Wales from 1810 to 1821. He has all sorts of things named after him, Lake Macquarie, Port Macquarie... even Mrs Macquarie. But she did well in Sydney with a point, a road and a chair.

The point is well visited because it has the standard postcard view of the disappearing icons...



Once you have this photo (or one like it with better, bluer skies), then your work is done and you can go home.



So it's a good job it's the last day really...

(There is a "me in front of..." shot - in fact, there are several... and a story...)

The Blue Mountains are part of the Great Dividing Range and only a couple of hours west of Sydney.

They are actually not mountains at all, but a divided plateau of sandstone. As such, the best way through them is over the plateau linking the highest points and not through valleys and gaps like in normal mountain ranges.



You can see the cliff edges and roads across the ridges really clearly.

If you try to get through these mountains by following the valleys and gaps, you just end up with sheer cliff faces in front of you and have to go back. As the orginal colonial explorers found...

Never mind, their memory lives on in some of the towns which are named after them: Wentworth Falls, Lawson, and several others which I can't remember.

Scenic World is a reasonably environmentally friendy attempt to build what is essentially a limited set of theme park rides in a World Heritage Area.

First you go across...



(The nowdays-obligatory-tourist-attraction-glass-floor...)



And the views are just spectacular...



These are the Three Sisters. They are basically sandstone eroded by the wind and rain of thousands and thousands of years but, as with everything here, there is some Aboriginal Story about how they got their name.



Then you go down...



...on the steepest inclined funicular railway in the world. So steep that the seats in the train are angled back to stop you falling out the front...

(This is a very shaky, out-of-focus shot, but that's because it was bloody scary and I as hanging on for dear life.)

And then you go back up again on some bog-standard, Swiss-built cable car, perhaps second-hand from the ski slopes...



What doesn't fill you with confidence about any of these experiences is that there is a fourth ride...



...a roller coaster which the family who owns the park built down the sheer cliff face.

You're waiting now for the story of the tragic accident which meant it was never used. Sorry, that's not coming. It was just that having commissioned, designed and built it, they realised that the annual health and safety maintenance checks would be prohibitively expensive and mothballed it. The track sits there still as some kind of Scooby Doo Ride to hell. Apparently, it was only ever used once, by the owner's daughters. Rather them than me...

Lisa, our guide up the Sydney Harbour Bridge, was a laugh.

Standing at the top (that's not spoiling it, of course I made it to the top...), she told us how far it was down. 139 metres or 439 feet. "Or 5 seconds", she said "if you choose to go that way..."

Actually the whole Bridge Climb operation is utterly professional. Right down to its little yellow clips, which are the most important safety feature of the climb. They clip everything you might possibly have to take up with you to your fashionable grey boiler suit to avoid you dropping it onto the traffic 5 seconds below. When the guy setting up the climb proposed the idea to the council, who own the bridge, they gave him 96 reasons why it wouldn't be possible.

Like a true entrepreneur, he researched and solved all 96 points of objection and that's why you can climb the bridge today.

One of them was the dropping things. Glasses, hats, handkerchiefs, fleece, radio, headsets (with special bone induction headphones - you don't put them over your ears, they rest on your cheek bones)... the whole lot has to be clipped on for dear life.

Then they have to clip you onto the bridge and you practise this before you get out there on a bit of scaffolding'n'ladders they have rigged up in the reception building. It's done using a bloody clever bit of equipment actually - a little rotating mechanism of cogs and gubbins which means that you can't become detached from the high tension steel safety wire which follows you round the entire route.

A couple of bits are ladders and they show you safely how to get up and down them. When you are actually out on the bridge, she calmly tells you over the skull-vibrating headsets that the real ladders take you up between lanes 7 and 8 of the traffic. (And between two express train lines on the way down.) She's so reassuring though, that you don't worry.

Here's a photo I took later from one of the bridge towers, which show a little of the route you take... (You'll have to zoom in to see properly...)



You can't take your camera up on the real climb because you might drop it. I think they could find some ingenious way of yellow-clipping it to you so that you could, but then they wouldn't be able to overcharge you for the official photos they take... Of course I bought them - I'm probably never doing it again!





It's a real sense of achievement - you even get a certificate!

But your legs don't half ache afterwards...

When you book accommodation from the other side of the world, you're never quite sure if it's going to be in a convenient location...

In Sydney, Mantra 2 Bond Street is perfect.

5 minutes walk from about everywhere...



So get ready for Sydney! Here I come!

I am booked to do the Sydney Harbour Bridge Climb on Tuesday and, while not particularly afraid of heights, it is looking like an increasingly stupid thing to have committed to do.

In Brisbane, The Story Bridge is a vast web of metal...



(apparently "The Symbol of Brisbane" said the guide, although I notice the City Council have wisely eschewed this ugly Mecanno in favour of "Picturesque Town Hall and suntopped palm tree"...)

Anyway, in the best traditions of jumping on the bandwagon and fleecing tourists, you can climb this one as well...



Don't those people look small?

And vulnerable...!

Places always look great from high-up.

You get such a wide, expansive view and see the city in its place in the environment, between the bay and the hills. All flaws are ironed out - you can't see the building sites, the cracked pavements or the graffiti.

And it's also really quiet - you're well away from the noise and from the busy business of people's daily lives.

In Brisbane, Mount Coot-Tha is the place to do that. Fifteen minutes by bus and a great place to have lunch with a view.

Against my better judgement, here is a picture of me doing just that...



This is one of very few "This is me in front of..." pictures from the entire holiday. I can't be doing with them in the main. I know I was here, I'm presuming everyone else believes I was, so "This is me in front of..." just spoils the view. ("This one is me in front of the pyramids, this is me in front of the Taj Mahal..." - Yes...!! Now get out of the bloody way...!!!)

When you arrive in a city late in the day, as we did in Brisbane on Sunday, there's not enough time to get your bearings and explore properly and you might be left with a less than flattering opinion of the place. (viz Hereford...)

So I apologise to Brisbane for my earlier comments comparing it to Birmingham (and to Birmingham for using it as a benchmark for badness) and am thankful for the full couple of proper exploring days before leaving for Sydney.

Brisbane is called the River City and so, in addition to the normal ways of exploring which give you the flavour of anywhere new (by walking, by public transport, eating and drinking, from somewhere high up, etc), this city has to be explored by river.

You can do this fairly easily in Brisbane, because the river is an integrated part of the public transport system. The River Cat...



...darts happily up and down the river from very early to very late. The ticket for the sightseeing bus includes unlimited river travel, so we did some unlimited river travel.

And it turns out that Brisbane is actually very nice...

Lots of desireable, and very expensive, waterfront properties...



(This one, it turns out, is not as old as it looks. It was built in 1980 by a member of the Lloyds Insurance family. He spends most of the year away on business so, as the guide told us, the live-in housekeeper and the gardeners have the whole place to themselves for much of the year.)

Brisbane has an industrial history...



(Brisbane Powerhouse: Now an arts centre à la Tate Modern)



(Now swanky apartments)

And it has old Coloninial buildings a-plenty...



...nestled in between the very new, very high and, apparently, very secure office blocks...

(Thanks to Peter, who has helpfully commented on some of my Brisbane photos to tell me what they are...!)

When we were all in New Zealand, we travelled round in a hire car and, although most of the accommodation was sorted in advance, on a few occasions we just arrived in a town and asked the people at the information centre where was good to stay. It all worked out well and most times, we ended up with high-end, luxury apartments for peanuts as it was winter and they weren't going to get filled otherwise.

While this was all very fine and wonderful, it's the closest I'm likely to come to an adventure holiday. I like to have it all organised in advance. I like to know where I am going when, how, when I am likely to get there, all in the knowledge that there will be walls and a roof (to keep the birds out), a comfortable bed and something to make some coffee with when I get there. I like to have pieces of paper to consult, phone numbers to phone.

Every last day of this holiday has its travel and accommodation documented in this way and I had expected the problem to be with JetStar out of Melbourne on the way to Brisbane. JetStar is FlyBe. It's the budget wing of QANTAS. This is worrying on several counts:

1. Last time I flew on anything similar, EasyJet stranded me in Berlin Airport for nine hours with no chair and a voucher for Bratwurst.

2. JetStar fly from Avalon airport which, continuing the Arthurian theme, is about as difficult to find as The Holy Grail. When you get there, it's like the "Let's Play Airports" Airport. For example, it has one security scanner for all passengers, which looks like someone made it out of a DIY electronics kit you get free with a magazine. "AUSTRALIAN BUDGET AIRPORT MAGAZINE: Week by week, each part gives you all the basic services and facilities you'll need for your OWN international travel gateway. 96 parts with a FREE BINDER which you won't use. First part $1.99. Subsequent parts $9.99. Next week - REAL Duty Free shop with Baileys miniatures, travel socket adaptors and a kangaroo keyring..."

3. QANTAS seem to be having difficulty keeping their full-priced wings attached to their planes, never mind the budget ones....

As it happened, that bit all went off without a hitch and so it was that the first travel problem turned out to be waiting in Harvey Bay for Dave-O and his Bus of Danger and Intolerence back to Brisbane.

Well, he didn't turn up and four of us were left sitting on our suitcases.

The Kingfisher woman explained that they didn't use that firm anymore. There had been some complaints, and what Dave-O had said about them going out of business was true, although not because the boss was terminally ill. Because the boss had been pulled over by the police and the whole firm was in some kind of financial, organisational and, possibly, criminal mess. Our journey up to Hervey Bay had been their last.

How were we supposed to get back to Brisbane, we asked. Admittedly, my suitcase had wheels and made a good emergency seat but, when I gave it a cursory once-over while packing it earlier that morning, no engine.

"No worries," said desk-woman and she sauntered off in search of an email about just this matter which she seemed to remember seeing. She returned clutching Greyhound tickets for the luxury coach leaving Hervey Bay coach station, fifteen minutes drive away, in ten minutes. Pointing out the glaringly obvious problem this posed led to our suitcases being quickly loaded onto a bright Kingfisher-blue tourist shuttle bus and a driver as mad as Dave-O, but safer, hurtling us towards the town centre, tuning his short wave radio into the frequency used by the STOP-GO lollipop turners at the roadworks, while desk-woman got on the phone to Greyhound to ask them to hold the bus.

Did we make it?



Of course! Like I would be relating this in such an easy-going, light-hearted manner if we hadn't...

The coach was only half full, and bliss compared with the theme-park ride which had been the journey north. We pulled into Brisbane right on time...

It was now about 4pm and I may have given up listening to the iPod by now, but I imagine it had reached something along the lines of "The Wreck of the Sloop John B".

For this was Shipwreck Coast (®) and there are three major things to see here. For now, anyway. This is because the coastline is as it is because of massive erosion of the sandstone by the relentless Southern Ocean on a big exposed bit that doesn't have the luck to be protected by Tasmania.

And so you get these massive stack formations where bit of land have been left as the cliff had tumbled into the sea around them.

The most famous is The Twelve Apostles...



...and you can guess what's coming - there are now only eleven because one of them had the temerity to fall into the sea. But hey, they only changed the name from "The Sow and her Piglets" a few years ago so that they didn't have a tourist attraction named after farm animals and now they've had the sings done, the maps printed, the helicopters painted...

It can only be a matter of time before another huge chunk of cliff disappears, probably taking a few hundred tourists with it, and they can have twelve again...

Next westward is Loch Ard Gorge...



...two inlets, one of which is protected by this (near to collapse, I should guess) lump of red rock. Apparently it looks like a question mark from the air. There are two ways to check this. One is to pay $$$ and make Jeff another small percentage by going on the ludicrously short helicopter flight. And the other is Google Maps...



Handily, the Google Maps high resolution photography extends just shy of the question mark in question, so it's either the helicopter of take Jeff's word for it... It's the bit where the shipwreck was anyway. The most famous one anyway - there were 85 over something like 60 years. (It was definitely that way round 'cos he said "that's more than one a year...") This one had a Titanic style rich boy/poor girl/other way round possibly love story attached to it where one saved the other and wanted to get married but the other one went back to Ireland and they never saw each other again. I'm inclined not to believe some of the stories told by tour guides.

Finally, and the most south and west I'm going in Australia, is London Bridge - another rock formation which looks like this:



However, prior to 1990, it looked like this...



A couple had just walked over onto the right hand bit when the first arch collapsed. Someone telephoned the police to say that "London Bridge had fallen down" and understandably, the police thought they were hoaxers and took ages getting there. In the meantime, the TV network helicopters had picked up the information on short wave radio and there was a big race to get out there. Several arrived to get the first interview, but none of them could rescue them because they wouldn't have been covered for insurance purposes - the married couple had to wait for the official rescue helicopter.

Unfortunately, it transpired that the married couple weren't actually married to each other. They were away on a little illicit getaway - and they had also pulled sickies from work. Not good when you have the helicopters from several TV networks hovering above you...

This was Jeff's story, so it could have had embellishment, although he did say that several weeks earlier, BMW had hired the land and their new range was lined up along London Bridge and shot from the air for a new advertising campaign. Trucks and cars and support vehicles had been driven over, parked, driven back again. Three weeks later, the arch collapsed...

As you head up into the trees, it's a quick stop to see where the koala (not bears) are causing environmental havoc by killing all of them. Apparently there are 537 types of Eucalyptus tree but koalas only eat three of them. (Or something like that, Jeff and Norm argued the point earlier...)

We saw plenty of koalas, but most of them had the good sense to keep just far enough back from the track so that tourists had to use the dodgy zoom feature of their digital cameras. Which is why what you see below might actually be a koala and might actually be a cuddly toy which someone put on a branch to fool Americans...



No, it seriously is a real life living koala and you can see more of my portfolio collection for the BBC HD Natural History Unit on flickr.

They had kookaburras and parrots too, but nobody was much bothered by them...



Back in the bus, we learned that for tourism and branding purposes, the Great Ocean Road is divided into three parts:

• Surf Coast
  
• Green Coast and
  
• Shipwreck Coast

By the time the iPod had reached "Weather with You", the rain had started on cue to remind us that we were high up in the rainforest. It was at this point that Jeff turned into one of those enthusiastic people off "Lost Land of the Jaguar" - sort of a cross between Steve Irwin (in fleece'n'shorts appearance...) and Scrappy Doo (in relentless enthusiasm...)

So, down the track at Mait's Rest...



Lots of ferns and unidentified noises, sunlight peering through high trees and things dripping on you. A babbling stream threaded its way downhill, unseen under the undergrowth. Many of the trees are 700 years old and the rainforest in this gully has only survived because a major forest fire jumped the gully many years ago.

It's like The Eden Project...



...but real.

If ever you're in Melbourne and you have a day spare, you should Go West and tour the Great Ocean Road...



The road is long... 243km and so is the tour. We were picked up at 7.25am and dropped off 14 hours later, so it's very good value. The first stop is the aforementioned Aboriginal Cultural Centre, then straight onto the Surf Coast...



At this point you begin to realise that the iPod linked up to the coach PA system is going to do more than play light background music. "Let's have some surfing songs!!!" enthuses Jeff, our driver. I will leave you guess what came next...

Anyway, onto the memorial for the men who built the road. It's apparently the world's largest war memorial, built in memory of the Australians who died in WWI.



In the photo below, you can see exactly how the road clings to the cliffside on this part of the road. Jeff seemed not to worry about operating the playlist on his iPod at the same time as (not) keeping his eyes on the road in order to play us...



...well, you would think "The Long and Winding Road", but Jeff is not that obvious... Any guesses?

This is just in case you had forgotten...



May need to do a print out for when we hire the car...

(Although as it's the same as the UK, it might not be too much of a problem. Confess to being slightly worried by the "stay left to turn right" rule...)

When you only have a day to get your head around a city, it's best to let someone else take the strain of making sure you don't miss the best bits. OK, it would have been simple to attack a street map with a highlighter pen and dash round ticking things off, but this would have involved effort, and the advantage of the "Do Hong Kong in a Day" tour was that it came with built-in air-conditioned bus and a ten-to-the-dozen talky tour guide, Doris. (Actually, she may not have been called that, but for the purposes of writing about anything she did or said, it will do...)

First stop, up the Peak on the scary, almost vertical tram...



...which I was going to call "funicular", but it isn't, on the basis of there only being one. (You learn something every day...)



This is the other iconic view of Hong Kong...



...high up looking down, rather than low down looking up.

Both ways, you get confirmation of the way everything is packed in behind the water's edge and then clinging increasingly precariously up the mountain side.

Looking the other way, you get to see a bit of natural hillside that was too steep to build on and a snatch of the South China Sea...



(That shore line is also packed with high rise buildings - the tiny section you can see here is really the only bit which isn't...)

Anyway, not long here - over the hill to Aberdeen, which is another harbour surrounded by high rise government housing. You either live in one of those or you live on your boat...



...and then you go to work either fishing, or in the jewellery factory - part of the tour only so ludicrous Americans Canadians (see Twitter) can buy over-priced jade...



...or you try to flog fake handbags and Rolexes at Stanley market...



And that was just the morning...