Australia

I’ve been to Australia on two separate occasions. The first time, I visited Melbourne and Sydney, and the second time, I visited Melbourne and Sydney again (not my first choice, but I can’t complain either), and Hamilton Island and Cairns as well.

My overall impression of Australia was that it’s basically exactly like Canada, except with better weather. I’m sure there are material differences, but in terms of the important things, I felt that they were essentially identical. Both are ‘new worlds’ (stolen land, if you will) with a similar population count, demographic and language; vast countries with little pockets of habitable land, and a wealth of natural beauty and resources. Even the major cities felt the same, in the sense that if you placed me in an unfamiliar city in either country at random, I’d have a difficult time telling which one it was.

That being said, I would still visit Australia as a Canadian and vice versa! The type of natural beauty there is in each country differs a lot, and I thoroughly enjoyed both of my trips!

Melbourne

Melbourne is beautiful, and it might be my favourite city in Australia!

Two non-negotiables in Melbourne are Philip Island and the Great Ocean Road. I’ve seen each of them twice, and I’d still go again.

Philip Island is a little island a couple of hours south from Melbourne where, every night, a colony of hundreds of penguins come ashore to sleep on land. You go onto elevated platforms around the shore, and watch hundreds of cute little penguins waddle back into their homes — on many occassions literally at arm’s length! The entire process is genuinely magical; first, a few bold pengions scout out the beach to ensure the coast is clear. Once they’ve established there’s no danger, the rest of the pack starts coming out; hundreds of tiny waddlers hop onto the beach and make their way back to their homes. You’ll hear partners calling each other, wandering around looking for their homes, and eventually disappearing into little holes in the bushes. It is genuinely the cutest thing I’ve ever seen, and I don’t think I’d ever get tired of seeing it.

The Great Ocean Road is a beautiful stretch of road along the coast near Melbourne. Technically, the main attractions on the road are the ‘Twelve Apostles’, huge rock formations sticking out of the ocean just off the coast. However, the ‘Apostles’ are a few hours out from Melbourne, and you need to leave early if you want to make it a day trip there and back. They’re impressive, but in my opinion, similar formations exist all along the route (albeit more sparsely), and even if you decide not to make the entire drive out, you wouldn’t be missing out on much. I do highly recommend taking the longer route along the coast at least one way, because the views along the way were what made the drive genuinely worth it.

Sydney

I don’t know if this is an unpopular opinion or not, but Sydney is highkey extremely mid. The only thing to see there is the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge, both of which I didn’t find interesting in any significant way. The Harbour Bridge is a bridge — I have seen tons of bridges in my life. The Opera House is a cool building, but it doesn’t get much cooler in-person. We also went to the zoo, which was nice (ignoring the fact that it was a zoo), but you can also see Australian wildlife in Melbourne, in a much more interactive setting. Overall, I’d skip Sydney, unless the architectural histories of those two structures hold some significance for you.

Hamilton Island

Hamilton Island is my favourite type of vacation; it’s an island off the eastern coast of Australia essentially built for tourists. There are no cars — only golf carts, which you rent to get around the island to your room, various beaches, restaurants, hikes, and a lot more. The best part is that there are tons of wild animals going about, especially kangaroos! They’re everywhere, and it’s so much nicer seeing them in their habitat than at an enclosure.

The island is also one of the closest launching points for excursions into the Great Barrier Reef. We went for two of these excursions. The first, half-day cruise, took us out to a couple of (uninhabited) islands nearby with pristine beaches and views. I took a lot of amazing drone footage at these islands which I will someday compile into a nice video and substitute this sentence with. The second, full-day cruise, took us out to the Reef, where we did snorkeling and scuba diving! Snorkelling was included in the cruise fee, while scuba was an add-on.

While scuba is always an exhilarating experience, I felt that my first time doing it in the Red Sea in Egypt was far superior. I paid almost double in Australia, for half the time, much less depth and 2 divers per instructor instead of one. We even struggled to sign up, because apparently we were 5 minutes too late to the arbitrary ‘signal your interest for scuba diving’ deadline. Still, they accommodated us, but the shallow reefs they took us to were arguably visible from the surface and even accessible to the more adventurous swimmers and snorkellers. As a nail in the coffin, the corals themselves were unfortunately far more bleached than the Red Sea as well.

If you’ve done scuba diving before, I wouldn’t recommend it at the Great Barrier Reef, and certainly not at Hamilton Island on this multi-purpose tourist cruise. You’ll almost certainly have a much better experience at a company that exclusively does diving that’ll take you out on a private boat to a less trafficked area. Overall, a disappointment, but also maybe only because Egypt set our standards so high!

Side note: I accidentally left my Kindle poolside on the island overnight, and it actually got stolen! Wouldn’t recommend leaving your stuff around.

Cairns

The northern part of Australia is much closer to Indonesia and New Guinea than you think, and visiting Cairns drives home that reality. With its tropical rainforest and weather, it had a completely different vibe from the rest of the country I’d seen until that point. In fact, many of the scary Australian insect videos that circulate online are from the area (i.e. the state of Queensland), and I had the fortune of seeing a few of those large spiders!

We drove from the Port of Airlie to Cairns, which took about 7 hours; super fun drive, but I’d highly recommend starting earlier than 2pm. It is not a good idea to be driving late into the night along those deserted highways.

We mostly spent our time in Cairns driving around to towns nearby and doing some shopping. A lot of people use Cairns for excursions to the Great Barrier Reef, but we’d already spent time around the Reef at Hamilton Island, so we didn’t go down that path again. One tourist spot we did hit up was Kuranda, a ‘rural’ town a short distance away from Cairns. It’s a tourist experience, with a ‘Scenic Railway’ taking you to this village with lots of shops and experiences. The train ride was indeed scenic, but the village wasn’t really compelling; not worth going out of your way since most things were overpriced anyways.