When we first mentioned to family and friends that we were going to visit Australia and New Zealand their instinctive reaction was to ask “What cruise line - or what tour company - are you going with?” So when we told them it was a roadtrip, 90 days long, and that we were planning it ourselves, they were ‘a wee bit’ surprised, to say the least!
Surfers Paradise, Gold Coast.
A week ago I finished the last of 42 posts describing our trip, and based on some replies I got I thought some of you might like a bit more information on how we planned the trip. But first a caveat: I’m a retired old guy, living in North America (Central Canada, to be precise), so my perspective will be different than that of a young backpacker. I’d like to be young and spontaneous, but those days are long past - just so we’re on the same page to start…
Moorea, seen from our Tahitian apartment.
Papaette.
And also, to start, a confession: our roadtrip wasn’t exactly 90 days! brightonbonnie and I left Canada Feb. 2, 2016, and returned April 25th. So 84 days to be exact (it was a leap-year, in case you are checking the math!), but I thought '84 day roadtrip' was a bit awkward to say, and '90 day' just rolled off the tongue so much better…
Sydney Opera House.
We started planning our trip almost 2 years in advance. There were two reasons for this. First, we’d never been to this part of the world, and I wanted to do a ‘rehearsal’ of our trip. What I mean by that is the year before we traveled I wanted to have a ‘first draft’ of our itinerary in sufficient detail so that every few days I could check what would be happening the following year on our trip. On Feb. 10, 2015, for example, I checked what the weather was like in Tahiti, and how easy it would be to book a flight Feb. 17 from Sydney to Perth, and also rent a car and find accommodation at our destination. This rehearsal gave us a lot of information about the environment we could expect on our trip, but also served a second purpose – identifying arrangements that we had to make well in advance, and couldn’t just book on a whim a few days prior.
Uluru - and flynets!
Our overnight accommodation - cooler than Uluru, no flys, great food!
Researching our trip we did the things you would expect, using traditional print guidebooks and the internet for example. But if I was doing the research now I would probably start with #steemitworldmap, which is proving to be a great travel resource! The best resource we had was two couples who had done some traveling in Oz and/or New Zealand. They suggested using caravan parks for much of our trip, and wisely warned us not to expect any great wine deals since taxes (go figure) made the wines as expensive at point of origin as we paid for them in Canada! They had many other useful suggestions about our itinerary and tips on what to expect along the way, and also, after our rehearsal, went through our itinerary in detail, suggesting a few tweaks.
Oz caravan park cabin (in New Zealand, a 'motel').
Feeding kangaroos at Cleland Wildlife Park, Adelaide.
The first of three wine regions we visited - The Barossa.
Twelve Apostles on the Great Ocean Road.
Once we were happy with our itinerary I booked the long lead-time items we’d identified. The key factor actually was locking-in accommodation in Tahiti. I’d kept an eye on an apartment that looked promising in Pana’auia, a small town a short distance from the capital Papaette. It had consistently great reviews and was very reasonably priced compared to most places I’d investigated. But in order to book it I had to make sure we could get to Tahiti, and from there to Oz. As best I could determine then there was really only one way to get to Tahiti from North America, and that was using Air Tahiti Nui (a great airline!) from Los Angeles. Fortunately they are partnered with Air New Zealand, so that drove our choice of airline, and meant that to get to Tahiti we also locked-in our round-trip flight from Toronto to Sydney, with a week-long stopover in Tahiti, returning from Cairns to Auckland and then, after a 4 week stopover in New Zealand, back to Toronto.
Australian War Memorial, Canberra.
Stop on the national surfing championship, Snapper Rocks - Surfers Paradise on the horizon.
The second long lead-time item was accommodation in Sydney. After I’d done much of my research on Oz I had a few unanswered questions where local knowledge might be useful, so contacted the sister of a very good friend who has lived there for many years. In response to my three very simple questions, e.g ‘what’s a good car rental company?’, her husband sent me about 10 pages of notes on Oz, and much of that concerned Sydney, where they lived. On my list of places to stay I had Manly, and he had this suburb very high on his list of places to visit, so I took another look at accommodation there. To my surprise there was very little available, so I decided it would be prudent to book the best available then and there. I’m glad we did, because if I’d delayed even a bit I’m convinced we wouldn’t have found anything decent.
On the glass-bottomed boat, Great Barrier Reef, about to leave Oz...
... for South Island, New Zealand, our 'land of the orcs' road from Queenstown to Glenorchy.
On the Crown Range, heading to Haast on the west coast. Cooler than Oz, and at this precise moment, not raining!
Fox Glacier.
The last long lead-time booking was Alice Springs and Uluru. Partly this was due to the number of visitors year-round, partly due to the complexity of our plan: fly in from Perth, stay for a few days including a (very long) one-day tour out to Uluru, then take the overnight train, The Ghan, to Adelaide, partly as a reward for roughing it in Uluru (46 Celsius on the day!), partly because we love train travel!
Pancake Rocks, Punakaiki.
Seal Colony, Cape Foulwind.
Leaving Marlborough Sound to cross Cook Strait.
View from our cottage, Island Bay, Wellington. Early next morning I saw the Southern Cross for the first time (thank you Crosby, Stills, and Nash).
Great visit to the Hobbiton set!
Other than these three long lead-time items most of our 90 day roadtrip was booked en route, looking out about 7 to 10 days and booking caravan parks, rental cars, and even internal flights (from Sydney to Perth for example). Thus while we had an overall plan we still had some flexibility. The following example requires an apology in advance to my Aussie readers: the original plan included a week in Tasmania, but as we began traveling in Oz I began to question whether we’d allowed enough time for New Zealand. Tasmania didn’t just take a week, because traveling there and back cost us two additional days flying, dropping/picking up rentals, and arranging accommodation near the airport on the mainland so we didn’t face too long a drive. Based on all this we made a decision in Alice Springs to scrub the Tasmanian part of our trip in order to add another week to New Zealand. And we are glad we did.
Bay of Islands, Russell, celebrating brightonbonnie's birthday.
Auckland, seen from the ferry quay at Devonport.
If you haven’t already read my posts you can see the outcome of all this planning by starting the three series here:
https://steemit.com/travel/@brightongreg/tahiti-1-getting-familiar-with-the-island
https://steemit.com/travel/@brightongreg/australia-1-manly-new-south-wales
Or you can easily find the Oz and New Zealand series on #steemitworldmap.
brightonbonnie and I had a lot of fun on this trip, and I also had a lot of fun doing these posts. A good steem friend 
So on your travels take lots of photos and keep a journal, so you can re-live your journeys, and share them with us!
read me!
You can find this, and other exciting adventures from some great travelling Steemians at Steemit Worldmap -
!steemitworldmap -17.630260 lat -149.605600 long Tahiti d3scr