Backpacking in Australia: Part 1 - By Hayley Hobbs

Planning the trip of a lifetime…

I have always been the adventurous type and after working in Greece in 2008 and France 2008/2009, I decided to do a bit more travelling, this time without the working so that I could get to see more of the country I was in! I always fancied visiting Australia and when a friend of mine said she was going in November 2009 I decided to go with her. The problem was that I had not long been back from France so I didn’t have much time to save for the trip, and flights to Oz are pretty expensive; especially during the winter as it is their summer and therefore high season. So I decided that the solution was to go back to work and save up then I could follow her out in January 2010 for 2 months of sun, sea and Fosters!

I booked my flights as soon as I was able which cost around £1000 (see I told you they weren’t cheap!), and soon after another two of my friends decided to fly out with me for 2 weeks! Everything was working out perfectly! I found out which hostel my friend was going to be in and booked us all in the same hostel for the first 5 nights. The friend who was already out there organised the greyhound bus for us which would get us from Cairns to Sydney. It would also give us the added bonus of being able to hop on and off as much as we wanted at different stops along the way for some sightseeing.

So I bought a backpack, packed as lightly as possible and couldn’t wait to head to Oz!

The beginning of my travels to Australia

January came around and it was finally time to start my travels. As you may remember we had a lot of bad weather during January 2010, piles of snow causing a lot of flights to be cancelled throughout the UK as well as countless other instances of disruption and general mayhem! Myself and my two friends jumped into our lift to Newcastle airport: it was early afternoon we were due to fly at 3pm from Newcastle to London Heathrow, then at 8.45pm from Heathrow to Abu Dhabi, from Abu Dhabi to Sydney, and finally from Sydney to Cairns where I would meet my friends - phew!

We got to Newcastle airport and had a few glasses of wine only to be told that the flight was going to be delayed by an hour. Luckily we had left a few hours in-between in case of delays so we carried on drinking relaxed in the knowledge that we would still be ok time wise. An hour went by and the flight was delayed again, and again. At this point we were panicking as if we didn’t get to London in time we would miss the main flight to Australia! Eventually the flight ended up getting cancelled altogether, but the flight from London to Australia departed. So that night I ended up sleeping in Willington a small town in County Durham instead of in a hotel room in Abu Dhabi…not a good start.

I found out that the next available flight was going to be on Friday, the day I was meant to be arriving in Oz; this was not ideal, but if I wanted to get to Australia this was my only option! The next day it was still -20 and snowing heavily so we decided to play it safe and get the train to London Heathrow. We had a few hiccups along the way in the form of the train stopped for 30 minutes on the tack due to the weather, but we finally got there. We stayed overnight in a hotel and decided to venture out the next day for a look around London. We enjoyed a lovely relaxing day and travelled back to our hotel, however, our relaxation was about to come to an end! As we arrived back to the hotel that afternoon the fire brigade were outside and everyone had been evacuated, we couldn’t believe it! What else could go wrong!? We had expected to be wearing our bikinis by this point, not foil fire blankets, but we had to laugh…

That night we finally boarded and were on our way. We arrived in Cairns Australia on the Sunday, we pulled up at the hostel and the BBQ was on and the Fosters was cold - well you wouldn’t want a warm beer would ya ;)
We finally started to believe that this was going to be the trip of a life time!

To be continued.....

--Hayley