It is now Tuesday evening and yet I am still reeling from the excitement of buying our tickets on Saturday morning. We went into STA travel as soon as it opened with a clear-cut and defined itinerary of what we wanted from our trip. Within the space of 5 minutes this had been ripped up and thrown out of the window!
Initially we wanted to fly from London to Jerez, then make our way to Madrid from where we thought we could fly to Dubai. As it turns out, the only way to get to Dubai from Spain is via London. This led to our first change of plan, we are now starting our Round The World (RTW) ticket from London and are just adding a return trip to Jerez as a mini-holiday before the big one begins!
Our other major plan change is our itinerary within Australia. The original idea was to fly into Cairns and then Brisbane, Bus to Gold Coast, then fly to Sydney, Melbourne, Alice Springs and Perth. We were told that to get the best deal RTW ticket we could only have 3 internal flights and this was a problem as we had 5!. We then decided to to change our ticket slightly and see a bit more of the country by travelling the entire East Coast by train!
We were well advised on which train tickets to buy and purchased an "East Coast Discovery Pass" for around £200. It is valid for 6 months and is hop-on and hop-off as many times as we need as long as we keep going south. We can now see much more of the country and all at our own pace. I am very excited about this as we are now not limited at all by flight dates and times.
The rest of the trip is still basically as we had originally planned with the exception of having pre-booked a tour of the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park (Ayers Rock and the Olgas). This sounds amazing, a 2 day camping safari, being woken to watch sunrise over Uluru. This was only £200 each including hostels at Alice Springs for 2 nights, not bad at all!
We have also booked and paid for travel insurance, youth travel cards, some hostels and also the visa for Australia. All in all it came to around £2500 each. Definitely the most expensive day of my life so far but money well spent I'm sure.
I'm very excited and will keep counting down the days and will keep writing about any new developments!
