Australia travel guide

From globally renowned restaurants and Gaul-galling fine wines to azure skies yawning above geological marvels — and more outdoor adventures than you can shake a boomerang at — Australia really does have it all.
There’s a reason it’s long been a gap-year favourite and an Antipodean utopia for British travellers. Here, you can take intrepid steps into remote caves filled with ancient, Aboriginal rock art, come face to face with a 6ft cassowary in the wild, and sleep under the Milky Way as you’ve never seen it before, unsullied by light pollution — all of this in an easily navigable country.
Forget barbecues and Bondi Beach — Australia is home to the world’s oldest surviving culture (dating back 50,000 years), to dreamtime mythology and mysticism, and to outlandish landscapes filled with innumerable creatures peculiar to the marvellous land of Oz.
Did you know that there are 1.2 million wild camels roaming the Australian outback? That wombats are the only animals on Earth to pass cuboid poo? Or that Goblin Swamp is one of the very few places you can find the snottygobble tree? Beyond the beaches, there are countless wonders worth writing home about, so peel a sheet of parchment off a paperbark tree and fill your improvised postcards with unforgettable tales of Australia.
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Australia is the same size as continental USA, making it too vast to see in just one visit. Consider what you want most from your trip and then base yourself accordingly in one or two of the country’s major cities.
Cairns is the hub of choice for experiencing the Great Barrier Reef and for visiting the 110 million-year-old Daintree Rainforest.
Sizzling Brisbane offers equal parts glamour and culture and makes a perfect base for day trips to the glitzy Gold Coast with its nightlife, white-water waves and white-knuckle rollercoasters. Idyllic Fraser Island — the world’s largest sand island — can also be reached from here.
Visit New South Wales and you can sunbathe next to kangaroos on the white-sand beaches of Jervis Bay, hike the Blue Mountains, summit the Sydney Harbour Bridge and take in a show at the Opera House.
Foodie-favourite Melbourne offers Australia’s best coffee, dining, arts and sporting events, plus the chance to drive the Great Ocean Road: 150 miles of superlative coastal highway that winds past the teetering limestone stacks of the Twelve Apostles.
Keep on going and switch off the engine in Adelaide, South Australia. It’s here you’ll find summer festivals, the Barossa Valley wine region, plus Kangaroo Island (and its koalas and seals) on your doorstep. Then there’s the dubious opportunity to cage dive with great white sharks from Port Lincoln.
Tasmania is home to those eponymous devils, as well as stirring views across rugged bays, and the surprisingly scalable Cradle Mountain.
Flying to Perth in Western Australia allows visitors to swim with wild dolphins at Rockingham, watch the shadows grow long from the thousands of natural sundials at the incredible Pinnacles, and wine, dine and surf down in Margaret River, the youngest and remotest of Australia’s wine regions.
Adventurous travellers basing themselves in the Northern Territory will find abundant aboriginal culture with Kakadu National Park, the 36 sandstone domes of Kata Tjuta, which is overlooked by Mount Olga; Kings Canyon, with its majestic rim walk, and everyone’s favourite Australian rock star, Uluru. Fly into Darwin for Kakadu, or Alice Springs for the outback.
Book a simple lodge, stay in a furnished apartment, or lounge in a five-star suite overlooking a sparkling harbour. All are possible in each of Australia’s big cities.
National Parks and wilderness locations offer barefoot luxury in the form of eco-lodges and glamping stays, where you can sleep under canvas — and the canopy of a four-poster bed — yet still get a wi-fi signal.
If you plan to really explore, you might find yourself bedding down in a platinum suite aboard the Ghan, the epic train that bisects the country, north to south, from Darwin via Alice Springs to Adelaide. Or on the Indian Pacific, which crosses the Nullarbor Plain and connects Perth to Sydney.
If you strike out into Australia’s remotest regions, take your bed with you in either a comfortable camper van or a formidable 4×4. On hot nights in the desert outback you can simply pitch a tent, ditch your flysheet, and stretch out under the southern hemisphere’s blanket of constellations.
• Best hotels in Brisbane• Best hotels in Melbourne• Best hotels in Perth• Best hotels in Sydney
Northwest Australia — the area encompassing the Pilbara and the Kimberley regions — lacks a large airport, making it one of the country’s least-visited destinations. It may not draw the crowds, but that’s no bad thing; this remote corner of the continent conceals some of Australia’s greatest gems. It’s fringed by glorious swathes of golden sand that stretch, empty and uninterrupted, for up to 80 miles. At Monkey Mia, in the Unesco world heritage-listed Shark Bay, pods of wild dolphins visit thrice daily to be fed by rangers and lucky guests.
Offshore, Ningaloo Reef may not have the bucket-list allure of the Great Barrier, but it’s more vibrant, much less developed and offers snorkellers and divers the opportunity to swim with whopping whale sharks, the biggest fish in the sea.
Inland, Karijini National Park is perhaps the county’s best-kept secret and is riddled with varicoloured slot canyons that remain cool enough to hike, wade and swim through even under the blistering noonday sun. Come evening, endless amethyst twilight spreads above rusted sand and charred-black trees, which would look at home on a 1940s Hollywood set, such is the scenic surrealism.
If you’re here in the dry season, then you can tackle the 400-mile Gibb River Road, which opens up the Kimberley’s wildest spots. Here you can hike desiccated trails to isolated waterfalls, bask in natural infinity pools, and wade through cave creeks under the watchful gaze of freshwater crocodiles.
Australia is a year-round destination but September to November (spring), and March to May (autumn) are typically the best times to visit. It’s when you’ll find temperatures at their most manageable and prices are still reasonable. But given the vastness of the country, it really depends on where you’re travelling to and what you want to do. In the south, the usual four seasons apply, albeit at different times of the year to the northern hemisphere, while in the far north, there are just two, self-explanatory seasons — the wet (November to April) and the dry (May to October) — and temperatures tend to stay the same year-round.
• Best time to visit Australia
How long is the flight to Australia?The time-honoured route is to fly to Sydney with a stopover in Asia or the Middle East, depending on which airline you fly with. The whole journey usually takes approximately 24 hours, although the duration of your stopover might make it much longer. In March 2018, Qantas launched the first direct flight from London to Perth, allowing travellers to make the 9,000-mile journey in just 17 hours — it’s currently one of the longest flights in the world.
How much does the average trip to Australia cost?How long is a didgeridoo? Cost depends on the length of your stay and your level of comfort, of course. Ideally you’d want at least three weeks to see the big-ticket sights, and you might take a short-hop flight between the coast and the utterly unmissable Uluru in the Red Centre, so expect mid-range prices to start from around £6,500 for two.
Which part of Australia is most popular with tourists?With so much to explore, most visitors to Australia tend to focus on east coast itineraries — the stretch between Cairns and Melbourne — where some of the country’s best-known sites are concentrated and tourist infrastructure is most developed. There’s no need to follow the crowds, though, and those direct flights to Perth are sure to create a whole host of bucket-list destinations on the wonderful west coast.
CurrencyAustralian dollar
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