Mike Unwin (left) and Tim Appleton (right)

Mike Unwin (left) and Tim Appleton (right)

I am here in Australia on a press trip to cover the wildlife wonders of South Australia and Tasmania. Two others of the team are shown here on our stopover at Singapore Airport. Mike Unwin (left) is editor of Travel Africa magazine and a prolific wildlife author, who also happened to edit my own book Secret Lives of Garden Birds. Tim Appleton OBE (right) will be known to most as the co-founder of the British Birdwatching Fair. In his other guise as Father Christmas he kindly invited me along on this trip. So I bought the coffees.

Our official tour begins in a few days time. In the meantime I’m visiting family in Sydney, while the other two are going to Adelaide – Tim on the white knuckle ride that is searching for a duck (Freckled Duck) at a sewage farm, while Mike will be on the utterly mundane treadmill of diving with Great White Sharks, poor chap.