Category: Australia
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Brisbane
As any non-Queenslander will be happy to inform you, Queensland is the Texas of Australia. In that case, Brisbane must be the Austin of Queensland. We were pleasantly surprised by the city and what it had to offer, as well as impressed with the ease of getting around. Between the free city bus loop, free…
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Surfer’s Paradise
After hippie-dippy Byron Bay, crass and flashy Surfer’s Paradise couldn’t have provided a more marked contrast. The seaside resort offers a depressing lesson in destination marketing. Step One: Give your place a great name, one that rings of holiday and adventure, sunshine and beach. Step Two: Do whatever you want, people will flock to your…
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Byron Bay
As we headed North from Sydney on the train, choosing our next destination was a matter of picking places we had heard of and that potentially had more to offer than just a beach. After the drive from Melbourne to Sydney (twice), we had just about had our fill of beaches and Byron Bay wasn’t…
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Day trip from Sydney to Palm Beach
Known to many as the location of the fictional Summer Bay, setting of Home and Away, Palm Beach attracts a few fans, but not nearly as many as you might expect. In fact, you really need to know what you’re looking for, because zero effort is made to point out the locations. We were woefully…
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Sydney Walks
Thanks to the aforementioned shoddy infrastructure, public transport was pretty low on our list of preferred modes of getting around and the steep inclines all around the harbour quickly put a stop to any notions of cycling. Thankfully, there’s a range of walking tracks that have only recently all been joined up to form the…
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Ferrying around Sydney
Sydney is a beautiful city, with jaw-dropping vistas shoved under your nose at every turn, but I firmly believe that it is precisely the natural beauty afforded the harbour city that makes it so incredibly lazy regarding the more mundane aspects of a liveable city, such as a functioning infrastructure. The public transport offered by…
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The three-month trip
After Arek arrived in Melbourne, the serious travelling began. Limited by his three-month visa, we wanted to cram as much as possible in, without rushing around like headless Germans. Again largely dictated by the seasons, we started with the southern part of the country, slowly heading north as winter set in. A work commitment in…
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Two weeks in Tasmania
The only reason why my first trip (after a month in Melbourne) took me to Tasmania was the weather. They get cold, wet winters down there and I just about made it over for the last few weeks of Autumn. In hindsight, it was a great way to start. The manageable size meant I had…
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Rail Travel in Australia with Great Southern Rail 3: The Overland: Adelaide to Melbourne
After back to back trips on the Indian Pacific and The Ghan, going from Sydney to Adelaide, on to Darwin, and back to Adelaide again with just a few days in between, the 11-hour journey on the Overland was just the thing to wean myself off train travel gently. While the trip itself, the train…
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Rail Travel in Australia with Great Southern Rail 2: The Ghan: Darwin via Alice Springs to Adelaide
If you only do one of the “Great Australian Rail Journeys”, I would recommend The Ghan. First of all, it links several destinations that most visitors will have on their To Do list anyway. Secondly, the distance and the time it takes to get from one end to the other are a bit more manageable,…