Part Fourteen - Australia, mate!

My “quick summary” of the upcoming trip continues. My Finnish-reading friends have had the pleasure of reading a much more detailed description but I will spare you from that – you can always ask questions if there’s something you are more interested in! 

We are landing in Sydney, Australia on 20^th October. The plan is to chill a couple of days and do couchsurfing – we already found a host (even though I thought it’s too early to even send any requests!) so the accommodation bit (and probably some of the entertainment!) is sorted. I’m really excited to see what Sydney has to offer us, probably something like an opera house and some beaches for starters. Just kidding, it's meant to be amazing city with loads to see and do. Then we are off to Central Australia as we are flying to Yulara (Ayer’s Rock resort). I can’t wait to see the outback and the legendary Alice Springs! Obviously we will be visiting the Ayer’s Rock, Kata Tjuta and King’s Canyon - all the pictures I have seen look amazing and the people who have been there keep telling me it’s a sight that impresses even the most jaded backpacker. We are particularly looking forward to camping in the red desert - imagine star-gazing there in the middle of nowhere... strangely enough, even the gruelling 22-hour bus ride from Alice Springs to Darwin through absolutely vast nothingness seems really appealing for some reason. 

So after Alice Springs, with possibly a few short stops on the way, we are heading north to the tropical Darwin (that used to be our idea of a dream place to live until we discovered the impossibility of getting visas to live in Australia). From Darwin we want to visit the national parks of Kakadu and Litchfield and do some hiking. That’s one thing that seems so cool about Australia – you can go from desert to tropical rainforest in a day or two! Plans become less and less determined after that point but we are flying from Darwin to Cairns on the East Coast and from there continue down visiting the obvious must-sees like the Great Barrior Reef and Fraser Island (and probably countless other places that we don’t even know about yet). The only actual deadline we have is that by Christmas we need to be in Melbourne as we have a house-sitting gig there. We will be looking after the house and the two cats of a lady called Alison for about a week and a half, which gives us a nice chance to stay put for a while and to chill. 

After New Years we will still have a week in Australia, during which we are planning to go to Tasmania (that might not happen though, it seems like a very short time for that) and then it’s going to be bye-bye Oz, g’day New Zealand!