1. Plans

The planning process has been instructive and entertaining in its own right, so I thought I'd pass along some of our experiences.

With eight months to plan this trip we could take our time. We worked with the AAA travel agency, but ended up doing a lot on our own. The internet gives everyone access to information and we had more time to spend searching and comparing than the agent could. Also, I'd been to Australia twice (shameless place-dropping) and that experience helped.

First objective was to fix the time for our Indian Pacific train trip. It leaves Sydney only on Wed. and Sun. We picked the Wed. 9/12 departure, then gave ourselves three days in Sydney to de-jet-lag and see the sights. That meant a Sept. 7 departure from Albq and LAX. (All pictures in this posting are taken from various Aussie websites.)



That gets us to Perth. Now what? Initially we planned on three nights there to see the city and region but as we learned more about the forests and coast of SW Australia, and realized how far that area was from Perth, we decided on a fourth night. To provide the flexibility to follow whim we decided to rent a camper.

On my previous trips I had not been to the Great Barrier Reef, diametrically across the country from Perth. I was interested in going there, as was Dick. We considered working in the storied "Ghan" rail trip from Adelaide to Alice Springs, or vice versa. One possibility would have been to take the Indian Pacific back from Perth to Adelaide, then take the Ghan to Alice, then fly to Cairns, from whence to see the Reef. We decided not to risk diluting our Indian Pacific experience by overdoing the train thing.

Uluru, aka Ayers Rock, the giant red outcropping in the Red Center of Australia, is the most famous natural landmark in Australia (Sydney Opera House may be first Aussie image that comes to people's minds). Dick wanted to see Uluru; I wanted to go back (I had been there in 1991 - more on that trip later). Once we realized we could fly directly there from Perth (as opposed to getting there via Alice Springs as I did in '91), then fly on to Cairns, things started to fall in place. We allotted one night at Uluru, taking flights that would get us there in time for a sunset tour and give us the next morning free for closer exploration.

By this time we had pegged the back end of our trip to another train ride -- the Tilt Train on Sept. 23 from Cairns to Brisbane: a 24-hr. trip (that only runs three days a week). We would then fly on to Sydney for a night, then home on Sept. 25. This gave us three nights in Cairns. All told this makes for a 19 day trip, 17 days in Australia. As Goldilocks would say, "Not too short, or not too long, but ju-ust right," by our reckoning.

Couple of notes on how our own travel research saved us:

1. I had been to the Indian Pacific website and knew what the fare was for the accommodations we wanted. When our agent booked the trip she came back with a fare that was considerably higher. I sent her my info and that got corrected.

2. One printed resource we used was Frommer's guide to Australia. Reading it, I found out that Qantas offered discount packages that combined the intercontinental RT flight to Australia with in-country flights. It wasn't easy to find this package on the Qantas website, the name of the program had changed, but it was there and that package saved us, too. We had to give some of that savings back when we changed our Perth departure date, but we still came out ahead of booking all flights separately.

Next posting: lodging and tours.

Cheers,

Rob