On a bicycle made for two...

The first few days of van life were as expected, rather exciting and with no shortage of drama. A breakfast explosion on our second morning kick started the day, somewhat more successfully than the wafts of fresh coffee waiting to be drunk in L’s newly purchased, French press. After a scramble to turn off the gas bottle we soon realised the cause wasn’t actually a cooker malfunction but instead a result of our own stupidity. Neither of us had noticed the lighter sitting on the metal of the cooker, until it had melted and subsequently exploded. L, who’d started cooking breakfast but at the time was bending down picking something up off of the floor, nearly lost his eyebrows in the bang! 

For a population living continuously upside-down, we’d been finding Aussie’s a pretty friendly bunch and their greetings went far beyond the typical British ‘good morning’. ‘How ya travelling?’ was a common greeting. L soon came to realise that responding ‘by camper van’ only drew blank looks. 

Then ther…

The vehicle searching had ceased and we’d surprised ourselves with the outcome. Brace yourselves! For weeks we’d been trawling the web for used utes and ‘slide on’ camper units, either for sale together or separately and after a mega long day of viewing, in somewhat sweltering heat, we’d whittled the ute list down to just one. A 2011 Ford Ranger. Super annoyingly the best ‘slide on’ options were around Melbourne (in the south). Our only real option would have been to buy the ute and hope a good slide on would pop up for sale in the not to distant future as we travelled north. There was however one ‘slide on’ already advertised for sale on a farm a few days north of Sydney and after ringing up the chap to talk about it, we ended up agreeing not to buy the ‘slide on’ but instead spend a week or two helping out on his farm. As you do!
Enter two curve balls.  When L stumbled across the 1967 Land Rover forward control, naturally for him everything else on the planet, including myself, sudden…

And it comes down to a choice of 3: A camper van, A flatbed ‘ute’ with ‘slide on’ camper unit and then the wild card, which is a 1967 Land Rover Forward Control camper conversion!
L quite obviously is pushing for the wildcard. Land Rovers are a life long obsession, the Forward Control in his eyes is the creme de la creme. He’s been banging on about buying one of these monsters for years and after bumping into the German couple in Cambodia, who were en route driving to Australia in their own custom one, he’s literally never switched off the brainwashing. How L has managed to find a Forward Control on the right side of Australia, for sale, just within budget and with camper conversion, I don’t know. Then again, he has always been one to pull something out of thin air. 
Despite the Forward Control being the obvious favourite for L and oddly feeling slight enthusiasm myself (successfully brainwashed!?) it’s still not a straight forward decision. We will be living in whatever we choose for u…

Just when I thought we'd recovered from the cockroach across the face drama, L went and got bitten by an unknown native creature. He didn't feel the assassin attack but two rapidly swelling bites would suggest that it had and to top it off, in a really bizarre way. This native assassin had been quite particular and perhaps verged on having OCD. I concluded this due to both bites being in exactly the same place either side of L's ankle bone on his right foot. So strange!  Over the next few days L's ankle swelled to that of an old ladie's. I'd used my medical pen, which was actually just a Bic, and graffitied on L's foot circling the ever spreading 'redness of doom'. We'd only just registered for Australia's Medicare (a kind of NHS equivalent) 2 days previous and I hadn't expected we might be making use of it quite so soon into our 1 year trip. Thankfully on day 4 L's 'cankle' had returned to something vaguely normal and medical…

We were only into day 3 of a potential 365, when a nightmare of all nightmares abruptly woke me up. Bizarre unfortunate circumstances were fairly usually occurrences for myself. So it was of no surprise that out of the two of us, it would be myself not L, who would experience the cruel morning wake up ordeal about to unfold. The nightmare of all nightmares being: an unidentified bug to the face! Who needs an alarm clock when you can have a large unidentified bug crawl over your face? It was 7:30am on the dot when my ‘moving alarm clock’ shocked me awake, bolt upright. I will admit that this was probably the most effective ‘alarm clock' experience of my life, to date. You see I’m not a morning person, instead i’m a repeat offender of hitting ‘snooze’. There was no snooze this morning, this one had me fully alert in less than half a nanosecond. It would appear that whilst peacefully asleep ‘bug’ had crawled up onto my pillow and across my face. An instinctive face swipe followed by s…