Hello!
I am visiting Australia in Mid-late September. While I will be traveling with a friend in Sydney for the first week, I will be there an additional week alone. I was looking up fares on Greyhound and saw that there was a ticket you can buy from Sydney to Cairns making multiple stops along the way. I have a week to travel and was wondering if it would be safe for a 23 yr old female to do this trip alone? I currently live in Chicago so I am very comfortable in large cities. I would plan on staying in hostels at each city I stopped in.
-Is the Greyhound system in Australia safe?
-Approximately how long would it take to get from Sydney to Cairns via Greyhound? (Assuming I have a weeks time and could make a few stops, would that be enough time?)
-What would be the best places along the way to stop? (Here is a map of the route http://www.greyhound.com.au/Help/types-of-passes/maps/map-mini-traveller-syd-cns.aspx)
-Do you think I should take small flights up along the coast (Maybe Sydney-Brisbane, then Brisbane-Cairns) instead? I thought the Greyhound experience might be cool and I could sight-see during the ride!
I would appreciate any help or insight! This would be my first trip to Australia and while I am sure it is a wonderful and safe country, I am just nervous to embark on this journey alone seeing as I am a female (and pretty small! haha).
If anyone has gone up the East coast on a Greyhound or know anyone who is doing this similar trip please let me know! I would love to meet up!
Thank you so much!
-Very excited lady from Chicago 
Advice for female traveling alone
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If you looked at the Greyhound Australia website for trips between Sydney and Cairns, you would have seen that the quickest trip takes 46 hours each way and the fare is almost AUD 800.00 RT (assuming you are returning to Sydney to fly back to the U.S.)
While I think you would be perfectly safe on a Greyhound bus, I think it makes no sense to spend this amount of money when you'd be on a bus for a total of 4 days. It would make much more sense to fly to Cairns (RT) for under AUD 200, which I quickly see on the Qantas website. (There might even be better deals on Virgin Blue or Jetstar).
Spend the money and time you save by flying to Cairns (or Port Douglas or Palm Cove, etc.)
If you've 'done' Sydney and have another week to spend, what is you want to see and do? If you want to experience another city, come to Melbourne - Sydney has the glitz and the glamour (the Opera House, the Bridge etc.) but Melbourne has everything else - it's the sporting / dining / food / shopping / cultural capital of Australia. If you want a beach or want to go out to the Reef, go to Cairns -- or better yet, do both.
I can't imagine spending 4 days on a Greyhound bus. As longhorn55 suggests, check out the airfares on Qantas / Virgin Blue / Jetstar. If you're willing to spend $800, you should be able to fly SYD-CNS-MEL-SYD. Spend 3 days or so up in the Cairns area and 3 days in Melbourne - much nicer than 4 days on a Greyhound bus. The videos on this page (particularly the "Melbourne's Hidden Secrets", "Melbourne Lifestyle", "Melbourne Around The Clock" and "Must See") will give you a taste - http://www.visitvictoria.com/Videos/Melbourne-videos.aspx
Agree with tt7 & Longhorn - nothing to recommend spending 4 days on a bus, IMVHO. Do the SYD-MEL-CNS-SYD flights
Or fly up to Brisbane & spend a few days looking around Brisbane, the Sunshine & Gold Coast areas and then fly to Cairns.
Or hire a car & drive up to Brisbane (spend 2 nights somewhere along the way).
Or take a tour up to Brisbane or Cairns if you don't want to drive, but would like to go via road.
As to safety; you'll be as safe (or unsafe) here as anywhere else - keep your wits about you and don't do anything that would get you into trouble at home.
Dear me, not the Melbourne-Sydney rivalry yet again! All Australian cities have interesting museums, shopping and great food. No one city has the monopoly on culture. Perth and Adelaide are near fantastic wineries. Brisbane has some very interesting museums such as Gallery of Modern Art and Queensland Art Gallery. Hobart now has MONA in addition to TMAG.
Like the others I'd nix the Greyhound idea. As much as I love the Australian countryside, I think most people would get very bored with it after 4 days on a Greyhound bus. It's not as if you're hugging the coast the whole way a la Big Sur or the Great Ocean Road. En route, most of the major attractions are well off the main road, or are islands off the coast.
Assuming you'd like to get out of the major cities and see more of the wilder side of Australia, I'd suggest flying up to Cairns and spending your week in that area, including Port Douglas, Cape Tribulation, Mission Beach, and the Atherton Tablelands. Renting a car would be the best way to get around. Barring that, I'd look into cheap local tours (day and overnight) to get around. For a taste of the Outback and a good look at some Aussie wildlife, I'd recommend an overnight trip out to Undara.
journeywoman.com good solo female site for me
the hound from hell is always transport of last resort for me
long grungy slogs with very unusual people who do not smell well
Fly one of the nice econos if you can rent a car take a tour...
Anything but long bus slog really....
www.hostelbookers.com my fav hostel site happy travels.
I wrote a trip report - "An Australian Road Trip" - some time ago. Here's what I had to say about travelling per Greyhound. (Cobb and Co were the Wells Fargo in Australia, horse drawn coaches.)
I hung around Tennant Creek near a service station, thinking that if I got lucky I might get a lift north, but to no avail, so it would have to be the bus, a mid-night departure, Cobb & Co. Negotiate ticket, hang around, and hang around some more. Finally the bus pulls in, and yes, there’s seat – the last one, and space for the bike! Embark, find the last spare seat. I was not surprised to find that the last seat was adjacent to a woman with a BMI of about 67, and I inserted myself into the available space, thinking that if she breathed out, I’d likely be extruded out of said seat and into the aisle. She was a tad grumpy.
Bus pulls out, smell of fast food and stale cigarette smoke, intermingled with the smell of the great unwashed (of which I was a proud member), as the bus had come from Adelaide, 2000 kilometres to the south. There’s meant to be some sort of romance attached to hopping a Greyhound, Country and Western singers mention it not infrequently, but the romance, sad to say, escaped me. Driver puts on a C&W tape, and we’re off. I figured that Cobb & Co would be more comfortable, in spite of leather springs and gravel roads, than the seat that I was occupying, and so made most of the trip sitting on the floor, talking with the driver. I learned quite a lot.
Cummins diesels are better than General Motors diesels, the electronic controls on the Cummins engines can be a problem, a microchip fails and you’re stuck in the middle of nowhere waiting for a service guy. It,s a nuisance having the speed limited to a hundred on the bus – it makes passing road trains difficult. (I can attest to this – whenever I’ve had to pass a road train I’ve would the car up to about 160 kilometres an hour and scorched past, which seems much safer.) Cattle sometimes camp on the roads at night if it’s frosty because the bitumen retains the heat. A tourist took a photo in the bus at night one time, used a flash, almost blinded him, could have murdered the tourist. And so on.
We clipped along at about a hundred, and caught up with a road train, doing about 95. Headlights shining about five kilometres down the road – they make the landing lights of a jumbo jet look like tea light candles. Negotiate a passing manoeuvre, a highway pas de deux. Call up the road train driver on the UHF radio, make contact, we’re the Pioneer bus behind, can we pass. (And remember that a road train is about a hundred metres long, and it will take a minute to overtake). Road train driver is amenable, “Hang on, I’ll just take a look and see if anything’s coming”. Turns off all his lights for a couple of seconds, there are no oncoming lights visible, so he eases up a little and calls us through.
Short stop at Daly Waters in the small hours, hamburgers, chips, coffee, smokes (bus travel can be a health hazard, I’m here to tell you), and next stop is Mataranka, where I disembark. There are hot springs at Mataranka, and it looks quite tropical around the springs, palm tress and such. The palm trees look a little shredded though, because there a colony of flying foxes, like big bats, living in the palm trees and sadly, shitting in the springs. But the water was nice anyway, and I felt a little less part of the clan of the great unwashed afterwards.