Over the years that we have been travelling together, Australia has always been pretty close to the top of our list of places to visit but (until now) we have always put it off because of the serious amount of planning that a visit to the Antipodes would require. Ironically, we finally bit the bullet when, in the middle of July we started to wonder (albeit a little late) where we should go for the August Bank holiday and, with just over 6 weeks to go, Lina picked Australia!

We spent the next two weeks pouring over brochures and guidebooks deciding where we wanted to go and how long we needed at each place. We initially planned on spending just three weeks down under - that is until we made our first attempt at an itinerary when we discovered that we needed at least 28 perfectly planned days to see everything on our list as well as a teleport to get around! Luckily, we were both able to talk our bosses into letting us go away for 4 weeks but we still had to drop some places from this initial itinerary (Darwin, Canberra & Adelaide) to allow for the time needed to travel between places and also to give us a little slack for last minute changes.

We normally find that Kuoni are excellent for arranging our long-haul trips but this time, not only were they relatively expensive for Australia, but their phones seemed to be perpetually engaged. So instead we tried out a company called Travelmood that we had seen advertised in the Australian Tourist Commission's brochure. They specialise in tailor-made travel to Australia and they were not only very knowledgeable but also very cheap. We initially just booked our flights with them but later added most of the hotels, two hire cars, a dive cruise and an excursion to our booking as well as changing our itinerary 4 more times! They were unbelievably tolerant throughout all of these changes but it all took time to arrange and there was just 6 days to go before departure when everything (except our hotel in Ayers Rock) was finalised (and this last hotel didn't actually confirm our booking until the day we departed!).

Our route around Australia. (Click on any of the pictures to view a full sized version)

Although we are no strangers to the Internet, this is the first time that we seriously used it to help with the planning and arrangement of a holiday: We researched the various tourist attractions using an excellent Australian Tourist Commission web site as well as using the on-line versions of The Rough Guide and Lonely Planet; We obtained electronic copies of the Australian Visa application form (free) from an Australian government web site; We read detailed itineraries of various dive trips offered by Pro-dive (the company we went diving with) from their web site (which helped us choose which one to go on); and we made extensive use of an on-line flight booking system - but only to check the availability of flights when working out our itinerary as it was relatively expensive for flights (maybe that is why it doesn’t seem to exist any more).

Well, it was hard work planning such an intensive tour in such a short time but it was well worth it as we had a great time down under. If you have 31 days to spare, and you want to take the easy way out, then you are welcome to use our itinerary (which you can view by following this link).