We usually do a lot of research before traveling to a new country. We read travel books, watch youtube videos, search country specific sub-reddits and read trip advisor forums. You can’t learn everything though until you actually go there. We just spent over 2 months in Australia and I have compiled a list of things I learned, surprised me, or are just interesting to my weird brain. I thought I could compile them here for those folks that are looking to travel to Australia for the first time. To start, I think I will share my itinerary with links to each corresponding blog post.
9 Days in Tasmania Part 1 and Part 2
5 Days in Sydney and 3 Days in the Blue Mountains
32 Days in Brisbane Including some side trips to Noosa and the Gold Coast
9 Days in Far North Queensland
The first thing that surprised us was the geography. Australia has a lot of desert in the middle and is only really hospitable on the coasts. I didn’t realize how big of a ring of beautiful land is along the coasts. I didn’t see any desert. We drove a lot around the cities and everything seemed green and wonderful. It is really green! I knew that Tasmania and the rainforests of Far North Queensland were green, but I didn’t realize how much green there was everywhere else. We never found the Mad Max part of Australia. I’m sure it is out there but visitors, like most Australians, should stay along the beautiful coasts.
The amount of birds also surprised me a bit. I was able to add 122 new birds to my life list during our time in Australia. It was wasn’t just the number of birds, it was also how cool and interesting they were. Many of them are birds that you would see in a pet store like parrots, lorikeets, and cockatoos. Lots of very colorful birds that are just normal birds that hang out in parks and people’s backyards. The Australian Ibis is also an interesting find. They are everywhere and have turned into a nuisance bird in the cities. People call them “Bin Chickens” because they get into the garbage cans and poop all over the place. But it is a type of “Ibis” that in the rest of the world you get excited to see fishing at the edge of a river. The other really interesting discovery was the flying fox bats. Technically, they are of course mammals and not birds, but they are easily seen in almost every city in Australia in the daytime. They hang out in huge numbers in the parks, and then start flying every night to feed on fruit and tree bark. They were sooooo big that it was a shock to see them flying around cities with their huge wings.
The amount of animals that are easily seen also was a surprise. Tasmania was the best place for this, but there are a lot of easily seen animals in many other parts of the country. We saw a lot of kangaroos and their smaller cousins- wallabies and pademelons. They are kind of like deer back home, if you know where to look, you are going to see them. But they aren’t that exciting to watch. They generally just act like deer and eat grass all day. Once in a while, you get to see them hop around. We saw wombats in Tasmania, but they mostly acted like our marmots in Washington State. They hang out in their dens and just come out to gorge themselves on plants for a few hours a day. We also saw echidnas but missed out on seeing the other egg laying mammals, the duck billed platypus. We did end up seeing them in zoos along with the Tasmanian devils. The platypus and Tassie devils are both endangered so we weren’t surprised we couldn’t spot them in the wild. We did end up spotting a koala. We searched for days and were excited when we finally found on a hike just outside of the Gold Coast. But then, it didn’t do much but sleep. It reminded us a lot of our experience sighting sloths in Central and South America.
In New Zealand, people are very proud that they don’t have any dangerous animals at all. In Australia, everyone seemed very proud that everything can kill you. We didn’t see any dangerous animals except for a couple of snakes. We didn’t see any crocs or killer jellyfish but we didn’t try that hard to find them. I saw a harmless reef shark on the Great Barrier Reef but didn’t see any of the famous sharks that scare the surfers off the beaches. We saw some huge spiders but I don’t think we were in any danger. Overall, I think there is a lot of dangerous stuff in Australia, but you really need to go look for it if you want to see it. We didn’t want to see it.
In Australia, you probably are going to need to rent a car sometimes to see a lot of the cool stuff. I hate renting cars but I ended up renting 5 different cars. The car I rented for our side trips in Brisbane was from Hertz, but the other 4 cars I rented from Bargain car rentals. They were the cheapest and ranged from $20 per day in North Queensland to $40 per day in most of the other locations. They were all small MG M6’s which were about as cheap of car you can get. They are made in China who just bought the MG name from the old British car company. But, they worked great for us and all were automatics which helps when you are driving on the left hand side of the road. Bargain car lots were also a bit inconvenient to find at the airports. They don’t have any booths in the airport car rental rows…. you have to call them to send the van that will bring you to their lot a few miles away from the airport. But you can’t beat the price so I will definitely rent from Bargain when I return to Australia.
I didn’t know much about the history of Australia so we made a point to visit as many museums as we could. I knew about the origins of colonization as a penal colony but I didn’t realize how many cities had the overseas British jails. We were able to visit one in Port Arthur, Tasmania and I learned a lot more. I also didn’t realize that they didn’t really last that long. It was really just one generation and then the country was really just a farming, animal raising and mining colony for Great Britain. I also was surprised by the story of the Australian aboriginal people. We had just been in Tahiti, Cook Islands, and New Zealand and they had a common story of the Polynesian people settling there from just a few hundred years ago. The aborigines in Australia were there thousands of years ago and probably arrived by land during an ice age. They are not Polynesian. I read a lot and saw stories in museums about how of course the European settlers did not treat the original habitants very well. It was very similar to colonization stories in North America, Mexico and South America but in Australia it may have been even worse. The Australian aboriginal people did not really have voting rights and a start of a cultural acceptance as a people until the 1960’s. It is still a bit of issue today. It is a bit of a sad story but we enjoyed learning about the cultural stuff and seeing a lot of aboriginal artwork.
One of the reasons we travel is to eat new food. We didn’t find much new and original food in Australia. That doesn’t mean we didn’t like the food. We are big fans of the Australian pub hotel and ate in a lot of them. Menus all kind of looked the same- Fish and Chips, hamburgers, meat pies, and a chicken parmi. The chicken parmi is not the real Italian dish of chicken parmigiana. It is just a fried breaded chicken cutlet with tomato sauce and mozzarella cheese and maybe some cheese and then served with french fries instead of pasta. So a schnitzel due to German immigrant influence, then modified. Besides pubs, there were lots of ethnic restaurants just like you would see in American and most of Europe. Every town has Italian, Thai, Vietnamese, Indian and sometimes even Mexican. When eating out, we did a balance of international food some nights and Australian pub food on other nights.
Being in a English speaking country has a lot of advantages. The people seemed so friendly everywhere but maybe that is just because it was easy to talk to them in English. Of course, it wasn’t American English, it was the very colorful Australian accent. We really had fun seeing how they would shorten certain words of come up with slang that was new to us. Place names were often shortened to make them sound a bit more fun. Brisbane is Brissy, Tasmania is Tassy, etc…. We also liked hearing the same fun greetings over and over again. They really say “G’day” a lot. As well as “How ya going?” and “Good on ya”. Despite the fun accent, it didn’t feel like as much of a foreign country and I’m still not sure how I feel about that. Many times, I just felt like I was back in America and it didn’t seem so exotic as we usually feel when traveling the world. But that also made it feel much more comfortable and feeling like home. We could certainly see how people would want to move here.
One of the things I really enjoyed was the use of credit cards everywhere in Australia. Cash is barely used. In fact, I didn’t use it at all. I got out $80 at the start of our trip and I still have most of it. It is acceptable to even use a credit card to by a bottle of water at a convenience store. It isn’t just acceptable, it is expected, so I just used my Google Pay on my phone to charge everything to my cards the entire time. Even the scanners to get onto the buses and metro trains worked with my phone.
We were happy with the amount of the country that we could see but there still is a lot left for us to discover on future trips. We haven’t been to Perth, but we are hoping to make it there in 2027. We also missed Darwin as well as the whole interior of the continent. We have also heard a lot about the Great Ocean Road along the cliffs from Melbourne towards Adelaide. That is also still on our Australia bucket list. We saw a lot of the cities and enjoyed them but I think we are going to really remember the nature locations that we saw in Australia. Our favorites were Tasmania, The Blue Mountains, Noosa, and the Daintree Rainforest. It is easy when planning to see a country for the first time to focus on the big cities but I am glad we had enough time to get out and see some waterfalls and wildlife.
It is hard to believe we have waited so long before finally visiting Australia. It isn’t the cheapest place to visit but it is certainly worth it. We found ways to make it manageable for our budget by booking early, and finding some really good Airbnb’s and hotels. It is a long ways to get there but with our nomad traveling process, we were able shorten up our flights by staying on islands on the way down. We have all the time in the world in our retirement. We know we can do it now on our budget and we definitely be back. Hopefully this rambling list of some of our experiences can help someone else looking to plan an epic trip to Australia.
