A month of images in the Land Down Under

May 4th, 2011 in Articles by Paul 0

One month in Australia is hardly enough to scratch the surface of this vast and varied continent.  But I knew this going into it, and focused my time on Melbourne, the southern coast (the Great Ocean Road and Kangaroo Island) and the Outback.  I was hoping to fall in with a cool group of people soon after arrival and jump into a campervan on the open road.  Unfortunately, this didn’t happen quick enough for my liking so I ended up booking 4 back to back tours with Groovy Grape for a reasonable all inclusive price.  This is a pretty good find on a backpacker budget.  3 meals per day, transportation and accommodation all in one, and the more tours you book, the bigger discount you get.  I ended up doing the Sparkling Chardonnay Package for about $1500 AUD which included the 3 day Great Ocean Road and Grampians National Park, 1 day Barossa Wine Tasting tour, 2 day Kangaroo Island Wildlife Safari and a 7 day Desert Patrol into the Outback and Uluru.  As is usual with these kind of tours, your group and your guide can make or break the experience.  I’d say I was fairly lucky to have mostly good backpackers and pretty good guides as well.  I would have liked the first guide on the 3 day Ocean Road to have been a bit more involved with the group, but you can’t have everything all the time.  Because of the huge size of Australia, expect to have some days with a LOT of driving if you book some of these tours that cover a lot of ground in a short amount of time.  I’d say with each of these tours there was a pretty good balance of travel vs activity, with only a couple days of long (i.e. 5 hours or more) driving times.  Overall I was quite pleased with the Groovy Grape experience, and would definitely recommend their tours for the budget or time restricted traveler.

View Australia Image Gallery

Great Coastal Road

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