Finally, almost a year after my trip to Australia, I decided to publish notes and various thoughts along the way.
Unfortunately, visiting this country today as doing a Work & Holiday experience has become very common, I dare say, a fashion. When I started to engage in this immense continental island, that is to say, while studying geography at university with my Australian professor/researcher, it was not so common to go anywhere else in the world.
At least for me, it was not .. I dreamed of a far-away country, so great, so different that for us geographers had a particular meaning since this part of the world was the last land to be discovered, the “land incognitas”.
Now visiting this huge island has become easier and more accessible thanks to cheap flights to reach it and low cost domestic flights. But if you are a backpacker you will not be disappointed, at all, because in the whole country you breathe a jagged atmosphere and you will really often encounter other travelers backpack like you. Despite modern times, travel to this country is still a conquest and a dream for many, just because it is so far and frighteningly immense. The Australians themselves are very open to travelers, indeed they admire a bit of envy for them because in many cases travelers will see places that they will never see or still live in another way.
As you can imagine the best way to get to know and travel best the Down Under Country, is by road, so if not strictly necessary it is better not to take internal flights and experience the journey on the ground, on the road, to feel and live Immense and unimaginable distances. Only then will you enjoy its great open spaces.
You do not realize how big the country is when you do not decide to visit it somewhere .. and so you soon get the feeling that even the seemingly shortest route actually needs a lot more time to travel.
Australia is a continental island, mostly arid and deserted except for the coastal strip, where all Australian cities and the state of Queensland are tropical.
Initially, I thought of my trip to this country as a slow crossing where I would have stopped for several weeks in the states I most liked with Workaway formula (work for food and lodging), but as I say the plans are Made for being distracted and so my vanguard for the country lasted roughly “just” a month and a half.
And so I decided to build my 40-day itinerary in this way:
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Sydney – Brisbane (14h12m, Transportation NSW TrainLink)
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Brisbane – Cairns (24h QueenslandRail Travel)
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Cairns – Darwin (plane, sigh)
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Darwin – Alice Springs (23h10m, Red Day-Nighting Seat, Ghan Train)
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Alice Springs – Perth (airplane)
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Perth – Adelaide (45h, Indian Pacific Rail)
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Adelaide – Melbourne (11h Firefly Bus)
The route so built has allowed me to visit the places I absolutely did not want to miss: from the tropical landscape of Queensland and the Great Barrier Reef to the famous parks of the Northern Territories, to the real Australian outback of the Red Center, close encounters with the small Rottnest Island marsupial in Western Australia, visiting the second most famous city in Australia, Melbourne with the famous Great Ocean Road.
To be continued…