On our last night in Australia, it was cold and miserable, and drizzle drifted on the breeze. We walked down to the harbour for a last view of the bridge and the opera house. The crazy shells of the opera house were spectacular to see, and it seemed impossible to imagine that it hadn’t always been there. It was also impossible to imagine that in its early years the opera house had been beset with difficulties, running vastly over budget and schedule, and with its architect Jørn Utzon hounded out of Australia by political interference. He never saw his completed masterpiece. By the morning, a ferocious downpour was battering Sydney. Our bus to the airport almost crashed, and our take-off was delayed by a couple of hours. On the way to Australia, the journey had gone quickly. On the way home it dragged on and on. To stave off boredom, I accepted every offer of alcohol the cabin crew made, and soon discovered how much more effective drinking is at high altitude. By the time we landed in the sticky heat of Bangkok at midnight, I was already getting the hangover. It had passed by the time we got back [...]

One of the iconic parts of Sydney is the Harbour Bridge. On an overcast day, we went to the museum in its south west tower. The museum was quite interesting, but possibly better were the views over the city from the top of the tower.

One evening we went up the Sydney Tower. I thought it would be impressive, but it turned out to be spectacular. We went up late in the afternoon, and not long after we got to the top night began to fall, and the lights of the city came on. The sight was truly amazing.

We flew from Alice Springs to Sydney. After we’d got into the city and found a place to stay, we walked toward the harbour, through the forest of skyscrapers around the central business district. Sydney Harbour is so famous that it almost seems unbelievable that it’s real, and I’ll never forget my first sight of Circular Quay, with the Bridge to the left and the Opera House to the right.

Alice Springs is a curious little town in the middle of absolutely nowhere. On a map of Australia it looks as if it’s right next to Ayer’s Rock, but in fact it’s about 300 miles away. If you drew a circle 600 miles across centred on Alice Springs, about 10,000 people would live within it. If you did the same thing in London, you’d encompass about 60 million people. We spent a couple of days in this outpost, and I enjoyed the frontier feeling. We wandered up Anzac Hill and looked over the town to the Heavitree Gap. Beyond the Gap you could travel through empty desert all the way to Ceduna on the South Australian coast. At the other end of town from Anzac Hill was Billy Goat Hill. This was off-limits to all except aborigines, being a sacred place to them. The sad state of urban aborigines was clear to see near Billy Goat Hill, as there were always a number of miserable-looking people there clutching bottles. It rained while we were in Alice Springs. This only happens once or twice a month, and after the shower had passed, the concrete paths near our hotel became covered in [...]

Kata Tjuta is a collection of giant red rocks about 20 miles from Uluru. The tallest rocks are taller than Uluru but Kata Tjuta is far less well know. I hadn’t heard of it before we arrived in Yulara. We headed out there to have a look around, and did an excellent walk through the rocks. We passed through the Valley of the Winds, and the six of us were the only people in sight in the vastness of the landscape. I felt like we were walking on the surface of Mars. Although it was winter, and bitterly cold at night, temperatures were high enough in the day for us to feel pretty exhausted by the end of our circuit. We’d only taken two small bottles of water, and signs at the start of the trail made it clear that in summer, that would have been a lethal error.

The darkness of the skies over Uluru was incredible. Even from the cities, the Milky Way was impressively bright, but out here in the desert it looked like it was painted on the sky. I couldn’t really believe what I was seeing – from the northern hemisphere we can only ever see the outer parts of our galaxy, but from the south, you can look right towards the centre, and our views completely pale in comparison. I walked a little way out into the desert outside Yulara to try to photograph the river of stars. I didn’t spend too long out there in the end – it was getting very cold very quickly, and I was still traumatised by my close encounter with a huntsman spider in Adelaide. I could hear a lot of noises of things moving about in the spinifex. When I thought I heard something running across the ground near my feet, I hurriedly packed up and headed back to Yulara.

We went out to a viewing point near the rock one evening at sunset. It was extremely touristy, and there were people nearby drinking champagne, which I thought was a bit over the top. But the sunset was more impressive than I thought it would be, with the rock turning some remarkable colours as the shadow of the Earth crept up on it.

We didn’t even know helicopter flights were an option here before we arrived, but when we found out we could do them, we didn’t hesitate. It was a spectacular fifteen minutes – we flew high over the rock, and it was the best possible way to appreciate what an astonishing place we were in. Everything was flat, red and barren, and the only things in the whole landscape that stood out were Uluru and Kata Tjuta.

We spent a few days in Adelaide staying with relatives. I had a terrifyingly close encounter with a huntsman spider while we were there, which left me on edge for days afterwards. A day out touring South Australian vineyards helped me to relax again, as did wandering along the shores of the Southern Ocean at Hallett Cove, watching porpoises swimming just off shore. After that, we set off on another epic journey, this time by bus to Yulara, a couple of miles from Uluru. “Don’t worry if you feel a sudden huge thump in the middle of the night”, said the driver as we pulled out of Glendambo at nightfall. “That’ll just be us hitting a kangaroo”. We passed through the Woomera Prohibited Area during the night, and at 6am we found ourselves in Yulara. It was freezing cold, and frost glittered in the morning sun. Later that day, we walked out to a viewpoint near the town. All around was flat, the horizon never-ending, except for the solitary form of the famous bright red rock. It’s such a famous object that it’s almost hard to believe it’s actually real, but there it was.

To get from Perth to Adelaide we took the train. Not just any old train, though – this is one of the great train journeys, taking nearly two days to cross the fearsomely empty expanse of the Nullarbor Plain. We rumbled out of East Perth station in the early afternoon, and until nightfall we wound our way through some fairly green countryside. At 11pm we arrived in Kalgoorlie, and in the morning we were deep into the desert. The line was a single track, and so the train would occasionally stop in the middle of nowhere to let something else pass. An announcement was made that getting off the train at any point like this would be a seriously bad idea. “If you get left behind”, said the announcer, “you will die.” It was strange to think that I was able to traverse such lethal terrain in a comfortable train. On the second day we travelled along the longest straight stretch of track in the world, three hundred miles without a single bend. It was monotonous enough for me; I wondered how the drivers did it without going insane. I thought we might be able to get up some serious [...]

While we were in Perth we visited the Pinnacles Desert. It doesn’t look far on the map but it takes a good few hours to get there. Our trip started with confusion when we turned up for the bus and said there were six of us booked in with the name Wesson. “Six?” said the driver. “I’ve only got two Wessons on the list”. It turned out he had two Wessons, and another six as well – we were not the only Wessons on the bus. It’s not such a common surname, we got talking to the other Wessons, and they stayed in touch with my mum and dad afterwards. We stopped at a town called Cervantes just before we reached the Pinnacles. On a white sandy beach by the Indian Ocean, we could see a storm approaching, and soon the rain was battering down. It passed quickly and we went on to the Pinnacles. They were an impressive sight. A fossilised forest rises from the yellow sand, covering acres and acres of the desert. Some of the pinnacles are small, some huge, and they all looked amazing under the dark stormy skies.

My dad used to work for BOAC, as it was then, and when he’d left had been given some free standby flights. It was a bit risky trying to go to Australia with them because there was a very good chance we’d be waiting several days before we could get on a flight, and when we went to Heathrow we weren’t sure whether we’d be going to Australia, just as far as Singapore, or back home again that evening. Just 20 minutes before the flight was due to go, someone came up and said “You’re booked on all the way to Perth – go go go!”. We sprinted through the terminal and boarded the plane pretty much at the last possible moment, unable to believe our luck. London to Singapore is a huge long flight but it went very very quickly for me. Thunderstorms lit up the skies over eastern Europe, and as we flew over central Asia we saw Tashkent glowing far below. We got to Singapore at 6am, and it was already 26°C. Soon we were off again, and into the southern hemisphere. Our first stop was beautiful, sunny, laid back Perth. For the first day or so [...]

On our final day we went for another lengthy hike, and we got some great views along the way. We were heading for a scenic viewpoint but sadly by the time we got there, the clouds had as well. We were just facing up to the long walk home in the clouds when some friendly locals arrived in a tiny mini. They offered us a lift back down, and the three of us squeezed into the back. It felt like the bottom of the car was going to scrape along the road, but we made it back down without damage. In the evening, the clouds cleared and once again we could see the bright red glow of lava fountains at the summit. We had to leave at 4.30am to get our flight home, so we stayed up all night, watching the distant explosions. We saw the mountain from the plane window as we took off from Catania. We hadn’t made it to the top, but we’d seen it erupting, and we thought that was a pretty good result.

Early on the third day we took a taxi to the Rifugio Sapienza. It was a great ride, up beyond the snowline, with our taxi driver playing Enya tapes at high volume. On the way we saw steam billowing from the summit and had high hopes of getting close to the action. From the Rifugio we got a cable car up to Montagnola, 2,500m above sea level. Four years after we were there, both the Rifugio Sapienza and the Montagnola cable car station were destroyed by lava flows. As we rolled up towards Montagnola, clouds were rolling in. They arrived about the same time as we did, obscuring the summit completely. We spoke to some guides about going up to the craters, and they said we should wait until the clouds cleared. Wait we did, but sadly in vain. We had a few strong espressos and hung around up there until about 3pm. It was still cloudy, so we headed back down and got the evening bus to Catania. In an epic downpour we descended back to sea level, and got a taxi back to Zafferana. A misunderstanding over the fare saw us arguing furiously with the taxi driver as [...]

From Zafferana a road winds up through vineyards and past houses towards the Rifugio Sapienza. The next day we set out for a good long walk along the road, refusing to be deterred by the thick clouds which descended as we hiked. If we’d have been sensible, we probably would have realised that January up a mountain is likely to mean unstable weather. We hiked up past old lava flows. In 1792 and 1992, flows had almost reached Zafferana, stopping just short both times. In 1992 the army had dropped concrete blocks from helicopters to try and divert the flows. The 1792 lava was covered in moss and almost looked like just another part of the mountain. The 1992 lava was still bare. We walked to a place with a view over eastern Sicily. The weather cleared up briefly, but only towards the coast. The mountain was still totally hidden. We walked on, but the clouds came in again and it was getting dark. By torchlight, we headed back down to Zafferana.

A photo of Mt. Etna erupting on the front page of the paper was the cue for this trip. I saw the photo in the morning, and by the afternoon I’d booked my flight to Catania, at the foot of the mountain and persuaded two friends to come with me.  We were young and naive and it’s amazing we even got to the airport given the extreme lack of planning.  We didn’t even have a guidebook, but somehow this didn’t deter us at all. Our flight was at 7am. Having slept at Heathrow to make our early check-in we were not exactly fizzing with energy on our first day. We we hardly conscious as we flew over the Alps, but I was awake and slightly nervous as we descended over Sicily.  We banked heavily and looked right down onto Etna’s summit, which was steaming gently in the bright morning sun. We walked out of tiny Catania airport to see Mt. Etna itself soaring into the sky, and took a bus that was going towards it.  We found our way to a village called Zafferana, at 800m above sea level on the eastern flank of the mountain, and booked into a [...]