I booked my flight to my final destination, Cairns, with Jetstar, a discount airline. It costs less than half of what we pay in Canada for a flight of that distance! I also booked my first 3 nights of accommodation at the Cairns Sunland Leisure Park. I will use one of their budget busting cabins as a staging ground to get organized. Do some shopping, prepare my food and repair equipment parcels, and mail them off to various locations along my route.

In the meantime, at home, I am slowly getting my equipment ready. One thing I am experimenting with right now is a Trangia alcohol burner. I am planning to take it instead of my tried and true MRS Dragonfly. I have used that extensively before, it works great, but man is it noisy!  The Trangia setup is much lighter, virtually silent, and the only drawback is that alcohol does not pack as much energy as naphtha, so I may need to carry more fuel. Methylated spirits are supposedly widely available in Australia, so stocking up in tiny towns should not pose any problems. I have not been able to source this fuel in Canada, but theoretically “metho” is a bit more energy dense than the methyl hydrate  I am doing my experiments with. So I should be getting better boil times than I am getting now. Time will tell.

Ooops, I just found denatured ethanol at Canadian Tire as well as at Home Hardware! But is costs almost twice as much as methyl hydrate.