Day 11. Hobart, Tasmania.

Me, Steve and Wend are up at the crack to catch the early flight to Tasmania, and the Broons and the Nobles are bleary eyed as they wave us off. Tired at getting up so early? No, simply devastated at the prospect of not having us around any longer.

This is the leg of the trip where we aim to get back to nature and experience some weird wilderness stuff.

So we pick up our campervans, don our hiking clobber, unfold our map of Tasmania’s wildest extremities and head intrepidly straight to a fish and chip joint in Hobart.

Well, we didn’t want to get up to anything too death defying our first day.

It’s always handy to have some local knowledge when it comes to the great outdoors. So later on, we meet up with Scott and Katy; a couple who were regulars at our local pub back in N16, but moved back to Tasmania 12 months ago.

They ply us with Scott’s homebrew while we ask them a hundred questions about what we should be doing over the next 3 weeks. And by the end of the night we reckon we’ve just about nailed our itinerary.

Then their mate Rob turns up and we have to rethink the whole thing.

Rob works as a geologist in Tasmania, and seems to be on first name terms with every square inch. He scribbles down some of his favourite walks and marks a few campsites on our map that we wouldn’t have stood a chance of finding normally.

We ‘camp’ in Scott and Katy’s drive that night and – 500 miles from the hustle and bustle of Bondi – enjoy our best night’s kip since we came to Australia.