On the 25th of December 2010, Captain Stu got out of bed and onto a plane bound for Australia in what was to be our first international tour as a band. With the help of our trusty manager Sophie we'd somehow managed to organise a three week tour comprising of 14 shows, 2 cities, 2 towns and several long distance drives, all with the express purpose of getting our music out there, making valuable contacts and having a tonne of fun while we were at it.

While this all sounds rather like a good old time, it also involved some incredibly rough patches, in which we were often forced to make impromptu plans for food and accommodation as well as transport to and from gigs for our mountains of equipment, but in the end it all sorted itself out, as we knew it would. We arrived in Melbourne on the evening of Boxing Day, tired and jet lagged but eager to get to our first place of accommodation - an 800 bed backpackers in Melbourne's city centre in which we spent the next four nights. We didn't have much time to rest of course, seeing as we had to begin promoting our shows with flyers and posters around the city as soon as we woke up the next day. This pretty much set the tone for the rest of the tour. We'd spend our days visiting venues, sticking up posters and handing out flyers in the streets, while our nights would be spent at our shows, performing our songs and meeting up with bands, promoters and local industry people, trying to make the most of our limited time down under.

The first 8 shows - all in Melbourne - were done in 8 long and exhausting nights, but once that first ridiculously busy stretch was over, we had a relatively easy second leg of the tour to look forward to: Sydney, Gosford and Byron Bay.

Leaving Melbourne was a little sad - it's such a great city with hundreds of awesome live music venues, thousands of amazing bands, some seriously friendly and accommodating people (Mandy Meadows from The Madness Method and Alex Dimitrievski from Gretchen Lewis) and a public transport system which literally makes ours back at home look pedestrian. This said, we were very excited to head out to Gosford for our next show at a place called The Rhythm Hut, and it turned out to be one of the better shows of the tour. This was the only venue we'd played at which catered for families, so by the time we were on stage the place was full of dancing people ranging from the ages of 3 to about 70. We were also invited to sleep over at the venue, along with a few patrons who weren't able to drive home for various reasons, and in no time at all we were quickly snuggled into several large puffy couches, supplied with blankets and pillows and hey, what do you know, a restful night's sleep for a change.

Our next stop was Australia's much loved Byron Bay, a small holiday destination for tourists, students and hippy-surfer types. We were planning on spending an extra night in Byron so we could relax a little seeing as the drive up was a solid 9 hours long and we wanted at least a little free time to play with. Our gig their went relatively well but it was the night after that which really made Byron special for us - we met one of our new favourite bands in all the world The Barons of Tang, a group defining their music as "Gypsy Death Core" - a label which doesn't quite fully describe the wondrous wall of sound which they belt out at an incredible rate of knots.

After Byron's mad party and the inevitably long and arduous ride back to Sydney, we were finally ready to get the final leg of the tour done and dusted. In Sydney we were lucky enough to be accommodated by Dale Smith (son of the Cape Town Live Music Guide's founder Mike Smith) for two nights and then by Jase Ohlsen (lead singer of reggae band Addison Road) for 6 nights. We were also lucky enough to spend a few nights in one of the most flea infested "backpackers" we'd ever encountered, in Sydney's Newtown, but luckily this phase wasn't one which lasted too long. We had to cancel one of our Sydney dates as it looked like we might end up losing money on it, but we were quickly able to organise another show to replace it when, at our first show in Sydney, we met some guys who invited us to play a mini festival they were organising that Saturday.

The following week saw us doing a lot of sight seeing and travelling around the city and playing 4 shows, 3 of which went absolutely brilliantly. Our final show in Oz was to be with The Barons of Tang as well as a few other bands with names like Captain KickArse and The Awesomes, and a very, very cool band called The Slimy Things at a well known venue called The Annandale Hotel.

The show was pretty much the best one of the lot with a large crowd of people through the door and a great reception from everyone. We ended off the tour on a very high note - going to watch the Jo Fabro Group who just happened to have the legendary Ollie McGill (keyboardist of The Cat Empire) playing with them that night. For the uninitiated, The Cat Empire is one of the greatest bands to grace this planet's pimpled crust and a band we have always taken huge inspiration from. Needless to say, we pestered Ollie and his very pregnant girlfriend the entire night, got photos and autographs a plenty and went back to Jase's house with happy hearts. We had just completed our very first international tour and were looking forward to getting back home to our beautiful city of Cape Town.