"Diversity" a Australia Travel Page by northeast80

Seen as Australia is all about diversity; of landscape, of people, of flora and fauna, I thought I'd show you all some of my photos of the wildlife I saw, from crocodiles to koalas the only thing I regret not seeing was a cassowary, I heard them and saw their droppings but never saw one.
All of the photos were taken in the wild, I don't agree with going to see animals in zoos.
They are in the three personal albums at the bottom of this page.

Map key-
Blue - Trip July-September 2005
Red - Trip March-April 2006
Black - Trip April-June 2006

My trip around Australia and New Zealand

I stopped off in Hong Kong about four days then flew into Cairns. From there went up to Cape Tribulation and in-land to the rodeo at Mareeba. Then I carried on down the coast stopping off at Mission Beach, Townsville and Magnetic Island, Arlie Beach and the Whitsundays, Mackay, in-land again to Biloela and then out to Great Keppel Island, and down to Brisbane via Rainbow Beach.
Having reached Rainbow Beach was going to go to Fraiser Island but found out all the money I had in savings I couldn't get into, so headed to Brisbane to get a job to tide me over until it was sorted out.
Found a job at the Ekka (a big fair) serving lemonade for 12 hours a day, half the time in the rain.

After Brisbane I headed down to Sydney stopping off at Coffs Harbour. From Sydney flew to Queenstown , New Zealand to be with the guy I'd met two weeks previously and we stayed with a couple helping out on their forest/garden and house, I ended up staying there for 5 months, the guy just two.

I had a month left to travel New Zealand so decided just to stick to the South Island, went down to Dunedin and Moeraki, the Catlins, Milford Sound then up the West coast all the way to Nelson and then further up to Collingwood, then down the East coast to Kaikoura and finally Christchurch.

From there flew to Melbourne, then up the Great Ocean Road and in-land to the Grampians to Adelaide. Decided I wanted to go the West coast and found a cheap flight to Perth.

When in Perth stayed with family friends for just under a month and then found a lift south with a Dutch guy. We took our time on this bit, taking in all the wineries, caves, breweries, tall trees and coastline all the way round to Esperance via the Stirling and Porongarup Ranges, from there headed in-land to Kalgoorlie where we worked on a sheep station the size of the Netherlands for a week.

I was going to head back to Perth for a bit, then somehow get back to Melbourne, however, my lifter, decided to go to Ayes Rock via the Great Central Highway so I decided to tag along. Lucky I did as we got stuck twice and nearly tipped the van, this was over 1700k's of dirt road in a Toyota LiteAce (a small 2WD van), not the smoothest of rides, we couldn't talk to each other for three days!

Well hitting the tarmack was heaven, we came into the National Park the back way so didn't have to pay any entrance fees, we walked around the Olgas, climbed Ayres Rock, spent a while in Alice Springs then headed out to the West MacDonal Ranges.

From Alice we headed down to Cooper Pedy, which was out of this world, down to Port Augusta and my second time to Adelaide. It was turning into winter now, seems the whole way around I'd been going against the weather, never really got much of a tan!

From Adelaide, back to Melbourne where I was going to get a flight to meet some friends in Singapore, however, I got to the airport to catch my flight ony to be turned away because I didn't have enough time on my passport, this was never mentioned when I bought the tickets, as you can imagine I was quite peeved at this so had to spend another week in Melbourne (not complaining about Melbourne, it was my favourite city) when I could have been in a very warm Singapore.
In one marathon journey went from Melbourne to Hull, England, this took about two solid days in all.