Australia and New Zealand 2 month itinerary

Old Oct 20th, 2014, 07:53 AM
  #1  
Original Poster
 
Join Date: Oct 2014
Posts: 5
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes on 0 Posts
Australia and New Zealand 2 month itinerary

I have dreamed of visiting Australia for over 40 years, and now my DH is planning to make it a reality. ( yes we are in our early 60s) I know that our plans are overly ambitious, but DH says this is a one time deal. Any input is greatly appreciated. Thanks

AUSTRALIA 2015
Day 1 – Pittsburgh to Los Angeles
Day 2 – Los Angeles to Sydney
Day 3 – City Tour
Day 4 – Blue Mountains
Day 5 – Tomaree National Park (Port Stephens)
Day 6 – to Brisbane
Day 7 – Australian Zoo
Day 8 – Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary @ Fig Tree Pocket
Day 9 – Tamborine National Park
Day 10 – to Mackay
Day 11 – Airlie Beach/Whitsunday Islands
Day 12 – to Cairns
Day 13-15 – Port Douglas/Barrier Reef (3 days)
Day 16 – Daintree Rainforest (1 day)
Day 17 – to Yulara
Day 18-19 – Uluru (Ayres Rock)
Day 20 – to Perth
Day 21 – Fremantle Prison
Day 22 – Rottnest Island
Day 23 – Wineries
Day 24 – to Adelaide
Day 25-27 – Kangaroo Island/Flinders Chase National Park
Day 28 – to Hobart (Tasmania)
Day 29 – Freycinet National Park
Day 29 – Bonorong Wildlife Park
Day 29 – The Convict Trail (Port Arthur)
Day 30 – to Melbourne
Day 31 – The Twelve Apostles & Gold Country
Day 32 – Penguin parade (Phillip Island)
Day 33 – Old Melbourne Gaol (Prison)
Day 34 – Eureka Skydeck 88 & Federation Square
Day 35 – Melbourne central Shopping Complex
Day 36 – to Sydney to New Zealand
Day 37-44 – North Island
Day 45-52 – South Island
Mt. Cook National Park
Day 53 – to Sydney
Day 54 – to Los Angeles
Day 54 – to Pittsburgh

we still need to figure out the New Zealand part.
princesskare is offline  
Old Oct 20th, 2014, 08:52 AM
  #2  
 
Join Date: Jun 2005
Posts: 4,039
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes on 0 Posts
You have obviously done a lot of excellent research and planning for this trip. I have but a few comments:

1. When are you planning to take this trip? You should think about the weather carefully before you decide when to go. You are traveling in the far north (Port Douglas/GBR) and the far south (Tasmania and Kangaroo Island). Depending on the time of year you travel, the weather in the north could be non-conducive to sightseeing while conditions in the south will be great and vice versa.

2. You are splitting your time to travel to/from Australia into 2 days. You don't really need to do this and I wouldn't recommend it. I have made the trip from the U.S. East Coast to Sydney several times and I once made the mistake of including a night in L.A. thinking it would make the trip more relaxed and less stressful. I couldn't have been more wrong. Dealing with an overnight stay and then having to go through security yet once more with my bags made this stop in L.A. such a hassle! I was no more relaxed when I got to Sydney than I had been on the trips when I went straight from D.C. Plus, I lost a valuable sightseeing day with that L.A. layover. It's just going to be a long trip no matter how you do it, so why complicate things with a one-night LA stay? (Now, if you had the time for a multi-day stay on the West Coast or Hawaii, my answer would be different.)

3. You have allowed too little time to see Sydney. I would allot at least 3 full days just in Sydney itself (not including side trips like the Blue Mountains). A one-day city tour just won't be enough.

4. Likewise, you have allowed too little time for Tasmania. We spent 5 days there when we visited and it was too short for us. I'd allot at least 5 - 7 days for Tasmania--it's bigger than you think.

5. You are allowing too much time for some parts of your Melbourne stay and too little time for other parts. For instance, on Day 31 you are trying to visit the Twelve Apostles and Gold Country (Ballarat/Bendigo) in one day. That's too much driving and too little sightseeing. I wouldn't recommend trying it. Likewise on Day 33, you plan only to see the Old Melbourne Gaol. That will take about 2 hours at a leisurely pace.

6. Finally, I always think that "less is more" when it comes to visiting Australia. If I were you, I would seriously consider limiting your trip in Australia to 5 or 6 destinations--you've got at least 9 major places listed here--Sydney, Brisbane, Whitsundays, Port Douglas, Uluru, Perth, Kangaroo Island, Tasmania and Melbourne. That's simply too much traveling even with an entire month+ to do it.
longhorn55 is offline  
Old Oct 20th, 2014, 08:57 AM
  #3  
Original Poster
 
Join Date: Oct 2014
Posts: 5
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes on 0 Posts
Longhorn55,

thank you so much! we are planning to travel mid sept to mid november.
princesskare is offline  
Old Oct 20th, 2014, 04:42 PM
  #4  
 
Join Date: Jan 2003
Posts: 19,792
Received 83 Likes on 5 Posts
Wow, now that's a trip.

I look forward to your NZ plans.

I agree with longhorn's #6. You're pretty much trying to fit a country the size of the US into a ~month long visit. I also agree you should just bite the bullet and not break up the journey in LA - in my experience, the hassle factor far outweighs any benefit. If there were a transit hotel at the airport, I'd have a different opinion, but knowing what I know about LAX, nah.

As much as it pains me to say it, I think you should either eliminate Western Australia (no!) or South Australia. I say this only because you've allocated so very little time to them and because of the travel distances involved.

We're very remote over here in WA - we're closer to Bali than we are to most Australian cities - it's a long way to come to visit a prison, an overrated island and wineries, which are widely available elsewhere. WA is jam packed with attractions, but at four times the size of Texas, you could easily spend a month here and not even scratch the surface.

I live in Perth, and frankly, your three reasons for coming here don't justify the time it takes to get here IMO.

You've given short shrift to the places on your list - I can't help but think you'd be much better off narrowing your choices and then spending more time in each.
Melnq8 is offline  
Old Oct 21st, 2014, 12:59 PM
  #5  
 
Join Date: Aug 2010
Posts: 78
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes on 0 Posts
We are in our 60's and travel a lot, DW is Aussie, I am kiwi, we live in NZ but have travelled a lot in Aussie, US and Europe. Would partly agree with other re no stop over in LA, we have flown Auckland to Florida with no overnight stop, its is gives you extra day, you will need it when you arrive downunder (first 24hrs in down time, every time we return it like that, 10 trips in 9 yrs)
As much as you want to see everything I would seriously cut out atleast 25% off it, especially the long travel parts. You will enjoy more time in the other parts where you will not be so tired. Also temperature's could by in high 30's C plus in Queensland and Uluru at that time of year.
Also how much are you flying or driving, you will waste a lot of time at airports
kiwipete is offline  
Old Oct 21st, 2014, 01:24 PM
  #6  
Original Poster
 
Join Date: Oct 2014
Posts: 5
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes on 0 Posts
I cannot thank you enough for your responses so far! We will rework our itinerary and also work on our nz plans. Any help we can get is appreciated.
princesskare is offline  
Old Oct 23rd, 2014, 10:01 AM
  #7  
 
Join Date: Feb 2006
Posts: 57,091
Received 5 Likes on 3 Posts
Hi princess,

based on our experience of last year of doing a 5 week trip, I agree that you are trying to cram in too much, and not giving yourselves enough time in any of the wonderful places you are planning to see. Even in 8 weeks you are going to be hard pressed to see everything, so you might as well accept that and give yourselves long enough to enjoy the places you go to.

in just over 5 weeks, we did this:

5 nights Port Douglas [flying into Cairns via Brisbane] for the GBR and beach
5 nights Brisbane [mainly for the cricket, so really 3 nights would have been enough]
17 nights NZ [4 nights NI, 13 nights SI, really we could have done with another week]
5 nights Sydney.

Have you thought about putting your NZ trip within the Australian one? [not sure that will work with your flights but perhaps worth thinking about].
annhig is offline  
Old Oct 29th, 2014, 05:23 AM
  #8  
Original Poster
 
Join Date: Oct 2014
Posts: 5
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes on 0 Posts
Hi annhig,

we are planning the NZ trip for the end of our 2 months. I am working on cutting down some of the itinerary, but real life is getting in the way of planning time...
princesskare is offline  
Old Nov 3rd, 2014, 02:35 AM
  #9  
 
Join Date: Sep 2014
Posts: 5
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes on 0 Posts
I agreee that you need to spend some more time in Sydney and Blue Mountains. I would also recommend visiting Hunter Valley, just two hours north of Sydney.

http://www.alluxia.com/destinations/hunter-valley-nsw
sophieflewitt is offline  
Old Nov 5th, 2014, 09:27 AM
  #10  
rje
 
Join Date: Nov 2005
Posts: 339
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes on 0 Posts
We just spent the month of September in Australia after which we spent October in several countries in Southeast Asia, before heading home to New York from Hong Kong. So we just got home! And I'm also in my early 60s.

A few thoughts:

I agree with all who recommend going to Australia without a stopover. I considered a stopover, but we ended up being glad that we got the trip behind us all at once. In our case, we flew NYC to Dallas, Dallas to Brisbane, and Brisbane to Cairns all at once. We stayed a night in Cairns (just to rest!) before renting a car and driving to the Port Douglas area, where we stayed for a week (including 2 nights in Cape Tribulation). Which brings me to a couple of other points:

You'll probably be less energetic than usual for a couple of days, both from the trip and from the time changes. If you're like us, you might consider your first destination to be a place that is more relaxing than the faster city pace of Sydney. We stayed first near Mossman, and after a couple of days had the energy to go snorkeling at the Great Barrier Reef from nearby Port Douglas, which I'd done on my one other trip to Australia and wanted very much to do again, as it is fantastic. There was a second reason for visiting Queensland first, and that is that the weather there usually begins to be less sunny and more rainy as summer approaches, and we wanted as much sun as possible for this part of the trip. So we went early in September, to maximize our chances.

And as you plan, keep in mind school holidays in Australia, that may impact how crowded certain destinations are. There are a bunch in late September, you might want to do a Google search for your timeframe.

I see you are considering going to both Kangaroo Island and the Great Ocean Road. Let me repeat a suggestion I just made to someone else here on Fodors. You can see a fantastic amount of wildlife and eliminate a plane trip if you skip Kangaroo Island and combine the Great Ocean Road drive with a stop in Cape Otway, which is not far from the 12 Apostles. Here's what I wrote:
"We saw so many kangaroos around Cape Otway that it almost started to get ridiculous! Many females had joeys peering out of their pouches, although this was spring in Australia, and I don't know how many joeys there might be when you are going. Some kangaroos allowed me to get within 3 or 4 feet, and I got some great photos!

We also saw many koalas, and were able to get quite close to some of them, too, with resulting closeup photos. Such adorable little guys!

And the birds there are amazing! So many different species of brilliantly colored parrots. And of course the cockatoos. The Galah variety as well as several others, including the "classic" white and yellow.

And the drive is amazing, too. We started from Melbourne, but you could drive there from Adelaide. Just look up "Great Ocean Road" to find out more. It is a very beautiful drive.

Also, the area is visited by whales at certain times of year, so you could see if your trip coincides with their migration.

If you did decide to go, I can highly recommend staying at the Great Ocean Ecolodge, on Lighthouse Road, Cape Otway, Great Otway National Park, Victoria, Australia.

Here's a link to some reviews and photos:

http://www.tripadvisor.com/Hotel_Rev..._Victoria.html

Included in the stay is a walk with the co-founder, Shayne, who will guide you knowledgeably to the wildlife, and later take you to hand feed their resident Sugar Gliders and visit the Spotted Quoll, both of which were a huge treat for us.

If you'd prefer a less pricey and more self-guided option, Bimbi Park has "glamping" cabins that looked quite nice.

It is helpful to actually stay in Cape Otway if you want to see a lot of wildlife, as much of what you'd see would be in the morning and at dusk. For example, I awoke to find a mob of kangaroos happily grazing not 20 feet from our window!

Also, we found the boardwalk at nearby Mait's Rest to be spectacularly lovely. Think the Enchanted Forest, all moss and tree ferns and magical looking trees.

All of this without having to board a plane."

We loved Tasmania, and thought that the week we spent there was too short. We were sorry not to have time to visit the modern art museum when we stayed in Hobart. Freycinet was very beautiful. We stayed there outside Coles Bay, and enjoyed regular visits from friendly wallabies! And consider adding Cradle Mountain to your itinerary, which is quite beautiful, and we saw numerous wombats there! But for Tasmania, I recommend visiting as late in your Australian trip as possible, to get as far into the Australian spring as possible so that the temperatures start to warm up. We were lucky with unusually warm weather at the 3rd week of September, but even then it did go down to freezing at night at Cradle Mountain before rebounding to around 60 in the daytime, which was warmer than average. Also, a bit north of Freycinet (still on the East Coast) is a lovely stretch called "The Gardens", with crystal-clear water and amazing rock formations. We drove up along the east coast and ended up flying back to the mainland from Launceston, which along with Hobart has many connections.
rje is offline  
Old Nov 7th, 2014, 09:55 AM
  #11  
 
Join Date: Feb 2003
Posts: 2,249
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes on 0 Posts
As an additional thought - you can't fly directly from Uluru (Ayers Rock airport) to Perth. All flights appear to go via Melbourne or Sydney and take a minimum of 10 hours or so.

It's certainly a huge distance and time to see a prison,an island and a winery, a Mel says.

You also need more than one jetlagged day in Sydney.
margo_oz is offline  
Old Nov 7th, 2014, 01:03 PM
  #12  
 
Join Date: Feb 2006
Posts: 57,091
Received 5 Likes on 3 Posts
>

possibly because you didn't have a stop-over, rje.

I don't think that it is fair to recommend to the OP that s/he doesn't have a stop-over when you yourself haven't had one. i can say that we did, and that when we arrived in OZ we didn't suffer from jetlag at all, and we had precious little jetlag in HK either, which is where we stopped over on the way out.

on the way back we didn't stop over at all, and it took us a week to recover. I would definitely have a stop-over in both directions next time, if we're lucky enough to be able to go back "down under".
annhig is offline  
Old Nov 9th, 2014, 06:23 PM
  #13  
rje
 
Join Date: Nov 2005
Posts: 339
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes on 0 Posts
annhig ,

You sound a little cranky!

I was agreeing with other previous posters who had suggested no stopover.

And I was drawing from the personal experiences of myself and the members of my family. We had a stopover before on a previous trip. Didn't make much of a difference to us on the east to west trip from the US to Australia, except to cost more, give us less actual vacation time, and make us spend more time in airports.

But your report of having a hard time on the way back isn't surprising. We had a harder time on that leg, too. Its well established that east to west trips, like Australia or Asia to the US, with many time zone changes, are much harder on the human body than trips from east to west.

So if one is planning a stopover, doing so on the way back makes much more sense.
rje is offline  
Old Nov 9th, 2014, 06:26 PM
  #14  
rje
 
Join Date: Nov 2005
Posts: 339
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes on 0 Posts
Oops, that should have read:
" west to east trips, like Australia or Asia to the US, with many time zone changes, are much harder on the human body than trips from east to west."
rje is offline  
Old Nov 11th, 2014, 08:42 AM
  #15  
 
Join Date: Feb 2006
Posts: 57,091
Received 5 Likes on 3 Posts
rje - I'm sorry if I sounded cranky, but IMO it is only fair to the OP that if you are recommending one course over another, you make it clear what your own experience is. Had you posted that you had experience of both stopping over and not, it would have been more helpful to the OP.

I take your point about having the stop-over on the way back, and I fully intend to try that if/when we do such a long trip again.
annhig is offline  
Old Nov 12th, 2014, 03:34 PM
  #16  
Original Poster
 
Join Date: Oct 2014
Posts: 5
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes on 0 Posts
Ok, Just to set the record straight, we are not planning to stop over, it was just DH's way of putting it down that we would lose a day during the flight.
We are drastically changing our itinerary, just doing Australia, and leaving out Perth.
princesskare is offline  
Old Nov 13th, 2014, 09:11 AM
  #17  
 
Join Date: Feb 2006
Posts: 57,091
Received 5 Likes on 3 Posts
sounds like a good decision, princess.

NZ will still be there next time.
annhig is offline  
Related Topics
Thread
Original Poster
Forum
Replies
Last Post
JulianoMelao
Australia & the Pacific
10
Oct 20th, 2014 06:01 AM
bwhizz
Australia & the Pacific
19
Nov 6th, 2011 05:50 AM
misha2
Australia & the Pacific
21
Apr 5th, 2010 02:54 PM
bryarcj
Australia & the Pacific
4
Jan 9th, 2010 07:15 PM
mnss
Australia & the Pacific
36
Oct 12th, 2007 06:59 PM

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off
Trackbacks are Off
Pingbacks are Off
Refbacks are On


Thread Tools
Search this Thread

Contact Us - Manage Preferences - Archive - Advertising - Cookie Policy - Privacy Statement - Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information -