Plans for the Wonderful Land of Oz

We’ve been in Oz for almost a week now, soaking up the sun and the culture in Brisbane and having a ball. It’s finally starting to feel like summer for us, as we’ve traded in the cool breezes and rain of NZ for the sun and humidity of the Sunshine Coast. On Tuesday, we will fly up to Mackay for a few days in Eungella National Park (hopefully observing platypus in the wild) before heading on to Airlie Beach and some time with friends in the Whitsundays.

We’ve taken a slightly different route with our planning for this leg of the trip. Australia is HUGE, especially after spending 2 months in New Zealand, where everything is so close. So it’s either spend long periods of time driving in the car in order to take in all the things we want to see OR fly over it all and get to our destination quickly but miss out on all the stuff in between. To solve this problem and keep costs down, we’ve opted for a few tours. That way someone else does the driving, it’s cheaper than if we tried to do the same trip ourselves, and we get to see everything we want to see. It’s an all-around win for us, but also very out of character. We don’t typically like to go on bus tours.

But we did a lot of research into outfitters here and picked one that does small tours for adventure-minded hands-on people like us. And I think we’ve chosen rather well and are going to get the most bang for our buck using this option. It also means we’ll both get to enjoy the scenery rather than having to drive ourselves.

So after time with friends in the Whitsundays, we’ll head to Adelaide and then spend 6 days with Lost in Australia camping in the bush, visiting the Red Centre and getting to experience Uluru National Park, among loads of other amazing things.  On this six-day journey we will travel from Adelaide to Alice Springs visiting Uluru (Ayers Rock), Kata Tjuta (The Olgas), Kings Canyon in Wattarka National Park, Flinders Ranges and the opal mining town of Coober Pedy, camping out every night under the stars.

After that, we’ll head to Sydney to celebrate Burns Night & Australia Day with friends. We’ll also spend a bit of time on our own in Sydney, and take a day trip out to the Blue Mountains for a bit of hiking and hopefully get to see some kangaroos in the wild.

Then it is on to Melbourne for a few days and hopefully meet up with some new friends there as well before we take a 3 day trip along the Great Ocean Road to Adelaide. We’ll hike and camp in Grampian National Park and try and take in all the features of the Great Ocean Road before pulling in to Adelaide three days later.

From there, we’ll hop a flight to Perth for our final few days in Australia before we head on to Indonesia.

After several weeks of downtime and a slower pace, we’re ready to kick it into high gear again for a bit. Let the adventures continue!

Got suggestions for something we should see or do along the way? We’d love to hear them. Leave us a comment!