It’s a sunny Monday morning and I’m in a parking lot east of Sydney, crawling through a campervan with a bleary-eyed employee of Camperman Australia.

“Here are the towels,” she tells me, her voice set on a pleasant sort of autopilot. “Sleeping bags. Cushions. Bucket. Microwave only works if the van’s plugged in. Engine’s under the passenger seat. Turn the propane off when you drive. Always put the radiator cap on tight.”

“Under the passenger seat?” I ask, not sure I’ve heard right. “Really?”

“Yes.”

“Okay then,” I reply.

“Here’s your keys. See you in two weeks.”

I test the key in the ignition and the van fires to life. A large yellow arrow mounted over the speedometer reminds me to KEEP LEFT. And moments later, after five sleepy weeks surfing and writing and sipping tea and watching DVDs, I’m westbound on the expressway back into Sydney at the wheel of a turtle-top Toyota Hilux loaded with gas, propane, water, bedding, pots, pans, and a vague smell of evil that I’m pretty sure is emanating from the mini-fridge.

After some sketchy maneuvers through King’s Cross, I’m back in Darlinghurst to load Lindsie and the packs into the van. It’s a beautiful day to set out on a journey, though a wrong turn immediately after the Harbour Bridge soon leaves me completely lost and frustrated and cursing whoever laid out these roads.

The mood picks up when Lindsie spots a Dan Murphy’s. For the uninitiated: Dan Murphy’s is basically an Australian Costco that sells nothing but wine (and a little beer). It’s unbelievably cheap — in fact, a neighbour of our couchsurfing host Jess told us that the prices are generally far lower than at the wineries themselves.

We park in a handicapped zone and hustle inside to pick up a case of wine for the trip. When we return with out spoils, we’re (rightly) told off by an older gent with a handicapped sticker on his dash. Still, as I tuck the fresh case under the bench in the back, I can’t help but notice that the sun seems to shine a little brighter.

And then we’re blazing north on the highway out of Sydney and into the forests around the Hunter Valley. The area reminds me of home in British Columbia — it’s vast and green, though with gum trees instead of firs.

Night falls and we press on for hours and hours. The road empties so suddenly at sunset that it’s truly eerie — suddenly, it’s just us and the occasional road train. Finally, exhausted, we pull into a pleasant-looking rest stop near Armidale, set up the bed in the back, and discover that the sleeping bags are really thin and flimsy.

It’s also cold outside. VERY cold. The kind of cold that I wouldn’t have thought Australia could summon up. It’s a big desert ringed by surf beaches, I think to myself. So why are my teeth chattering?

This is Lindsie’s first voyage as a car camper, and I’ve been wanting things to be cozy and perfect, at least for the first night. But things are anything but warm and cozy. We bundle up in our warmest clothes, transform the table and benches into a bed (presto!), and blast the heater for ten minutes… then turn off the ignition, crawl under our ridiculous little sleeping bags, spread every remaining item of clothing we own over the whole mess, and do our best to sleep.

The next morning I’m woken by half a dozen little drafts that have crept in to chill my various exposed extremities. I lie still and spend a few minutes watching my breath form little clouds before finally shrugging off the silly covers, opening a curtain, and wiping condensation from the glass. Sunlight sparkles off frost. This isn’t quite how I pictured Australia.

Things soon warm up, though, and by the time I’ve made oatmeal and coffee on our little stove, the sun has melted the frost. Revived, we continue north.

And now that we’ve survived our initial trial, the universe decides that we deserve a great trip after all. Soon we’re cruising with the windows down through quaint Aussie town after quaint Aussie town, slowing to cruise main streets that look like gold-rush America with old saloons and hotels. On a whim, we stop at the Thomas New England Estate Winery and are treated to a tasting session that goes on for two hours, accompanied by the largest and most delightful assortment of cheeses I’ve ever been served in a single sitting.

Leigh, the owner, is so friendly that Lindsie and I soon feel like we’re catching up with an old friend. Upon hearing that we spent the night in Armidale, she exclaims, “Armidale? But why? That’s the coldest place on the East Coast!”

“Nobody told us,” I offer lamely, loading a cracker with a mountain of apricot-marbled chevre.

“Well, just make sure you’re parked before dark so you don’t hit a roo,” she cautions us. “My husband used to commute in the dark, and he’d usually hit one roo on the way to work and one on the way back.”

This explains (a) the eerie quiet on the highway after sunset last night and (b) the mean-looking front-mount bars that make most vehicles north of Sydney look like something out of The Road Warrior. I decide not to tell Leigh that we had been planning to make a few hundred kilometers after dark tonight.

We’re sad to leave when the culinary tour de force is all over, and are only consoled by the knowledge that we’re bringing along a few bottles of excellent sparkling wine.

That evening, on Leigh’s recommendation, we stop in Moree and check into a campground with a series of pools fed by hot springs. It’s heaven after our bone-chilling night in the freezing highlands of Armidale. We soak and chat with RVing pensioners, who seem surprised to find a few young people in their midst. “The young ones tend to stick to the coast,” explains one fellow.

The following morning, the realization begins to dawn that our planned route is a tad… ambitious. We’ve planned to spend two weeks driving a big circuit north through the outback to Cairns, then back south down the east coast to Sydney via Brisbane. Aussies are probably laughing their heads off reading this, because eastern Australia (and all of the country, for that matter) is way, way too big to cover like this if you intend to actually do anything along the way. Like stop, or eat, or sleep.

We realize that we’ve been overly optimistic when we check the map. If our plan had been to drive up the tail of a kangaroo up to its snout and back, we would still have a long drive ahead of us before reaching the kangaroo’s ass. Basically, it’s hopeless.

But that doesn’t stop us from pressing on. After five weeks on the coast, I’m determined to see the outback, whatever the consequences. We drive west, watching the grass turn brown and the leaves disappear from the trees until they’re basically just sticks in the sand. Kangaroos straighten up and watch us blast past.

Emus (I think; I don’t know one giant bird from another) flee from us across the plains.

Stopping for lunch, we find the skull of a mean-looking, toothy little animal bleaching among the tall grasses. I think that officially puts us in the outback.

We visit Lightning Ridge, possibly the weirdest town I’ve ever seen. The population is unknown because the place is populated by opal miners who don’t take kindly to any sort of census.

Millions of years ago, a sea covered the central plains of Australia; its bed of silica was buried beneath sediment that eventually compressed it into thin seams of opal. This was discovered by crazy miners who moved out into the desert, dug a lot of holes, and spent a lot of time in them growing beards and picking at rocks.

We meet Arthur, a genuinely charming guy who built himself a house out of bottles back in the early 1960s. Why? “Look around,” he tells us. “There wasn’t anything else to build a house out of.”

Fair enough. His place (”The Bottle House,” appropriately) is a museum of miner memorabilia and kitsch, packed with miners’ tools, silly posters, and artifacts from around Australia, including a block of compacted shells from a beach north of Perth, sliced into a cube in the same way one would cut a block of ice for an igloo. Definitely worth a visit.

We spend the night at Lorne Station, a great back-to-basics campground on a massive swath of ranchland. There’s parking, a shed with kitchen and TV room, and washrooms with showers, and that’s about it. We befriend an ex-Nasa engineer named Gary and drink way too much red wine together, then somehow manage to wake at dawn and watch the sun rise over the outback, which is breathtaking even with a hangover.

(Yes, that’s the sunset. I think I slept on the camera.)

After an educational mine tour and a shopping stop where I learn that corn dogs are called pluto pups (WTF?) in Australia, we continue north toward Queensland. Even though mile after mile of ranches and desert scrub can get massively repetitive, we settle into a cool observational mood as the miles tick by, occasionally applying sunscreen to whichever arm or leg happens to be in the sun at the moment.

And we both fall in love with campervanning. We drive, we cook, we step out for little meals or rest stops wherever the view is breathtaking, which is often. We emerge from the outback into mile after mile of blossoming sugarcane - I had no idea how beautiful the stuff is.

And without warning, we arrive in Airlie Beach, which turns out to be Florida.

The culture shock is swift and brutal, and after a quick recon mission into the heart of town, we find ourselves in a campervan park equipped with pool, minigolf, and bouncing pillow.

We spend the evening coping with civilization overload. A good pinot noir helps us along.

Airlie may be tourist hell, but at least it’s got attractions up the yin-yang. You can reef dive or skydive; we opt for the bouncing pillow, then go snorkelling. Soon we’re in shockingly cold water floating over masses of incredible coral in absolutely breathtakingly beautiful seas.

I had expected it to be warmer (it’s near Indonesia!) but resign myself to some mild hypothermia. Lindsie starts shivering uncontrollably after fifteen minutes, so I swim her back to the boat to recover with tea.

The appropriately grizzled captain points to the spot where we’ve been swimming, then rolls up his sleeve to reveal a long scar on his forearm. “I want to see a shark,” he growls.

“What?” squeals Lindsie. “I don’t! Why would you want to see a shark? And what happened to your arm?”

“I got bit spearfishin’ as a boy,” he tells us, “pretty much right where ye were swimmin’.”

“What?” Lindsie shouts. “There?” Her shivers resume, more violent now.

“Yea,” growls the captain, “I want to see one.”

“I don’t!” Lindsie announces. “After Jaws, I was scared to go to the bathroom in case a shark was in the toilet.”

And that’s pretty much the end of our Great Barrier Reef excursion.

Ahab returns us to the dock, where we make plans to meet up with a family we’ve met on the boat for a barbecue. They’re staying at some place called The Wave; we drive around Airlie Beach for an hour before determining that there is no place called The Wave there. To console ourselves at missing out, we eat in the world’s crummiest Mexican restaurant, suffering through a pitcher of “margarita” that is in fact two litres of crushed ice with one shot of cheap tequila and a squirt of lemon juice.

We awake early and flee Airlie Beach, following the “cane train” route north to Mission Beach, which turns out to be a world apart from Airlie. It’s small, unpretentious, and located on an absolutely massive strip of pristine, isolated beachfront. The $10/night campground is right on the beach and appears to have plenty of year-round residents, one of whom has an inflatable wading pool. We love it.

And even better, Mission Beach has Christine, Lindsie’s ex-roommate, the Abbott to her Costello.

Christine is on a solo work/travel journey, and is just off a three-month stint working at a resort on the ever-so-charmingly named Dunk Island. (Seriously, what is it with Aussies and names? Dunk? Dunk?!)

It soon turns out that Christine is very ready to drink after three months on a ridiculously isolated resort where off-duty employees don’t even have a bar to hang out at. As good friends, of course, we’re right with her every sip of the way. What begins as an ambitious hike soon becomes an about-face that lands us at the bar, where we park for a quick rest stop at lunchtime that ends well after dark.

This continues for three delightful days. I swim at the apocalyptically empty beach, not far from the emergency bottle of vinegar installed on the shore. Fortune blesses me; I am bitten neither by shark nor crocodile, stung neither by jellyfish or stingray.

We cook our modest meals of oatmeal and ramen, drink wine in our lawn chairs, hang out with the kookaburras, and allow the white lines that have been burned into our retinas by a week on the road to fade.

Christine hitches a ride with us to Cairns, where our paths diverge. She’s off to Western Australia to see what adventures await; we’re flying to Singapore for a few days, then on to begin the second half of this great yearlong experiment… in Europe.

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