Australia Itinerary | Things to do | Budget Travel | Must visit places | Scuba Diving and More !!!

Hi everyone, I'm Soumya. I'm Sriram and this is our travel channel Geach2Hike. Welcome to our channel. In today's video, we cover everything about our Australia trip. We'll share with you our total travel itinerary for two weeks, the visa process, total budget, cost hacks and a lot of photos. So our main draw to plan for Australia was to go diving in the Great Barrier Reef and to experience the popular city of Sydney. But to our surprise, Australia had so much more to offer. Since we had two weeks break, so we wanted to primarily cover the east coast of Australia. What do you want to do in Australia is largely dependent upon your choices and preferences. Australia is a very huge country and covering every stage of cities would be very difficult. We wanted to cover the major cities, the beaches and the warm places of Australia when we were there. We traveled around early November, so tropical things left and Sydney was probably the best choice for us to cover the beaches and also do diving. And hence that was a choice for doing, that was the reason for us to choose east coast of Australia for our travel. Let's get started with the itinerary. We flew from Bangalore in India to Sydney, Australia via Malaysia Airlines. After spending three days in Sydney, we drove down south to Jarvis Bay. Jarvis Bay is popular for whale watching and dolphin watching. From Jarvis Bay, we took a flight to this beautiful place called Whitsundays, which is popular for its pristine white sand beaches. After exploring Whitsundays, we decided to drive up north to Cairns. Cairns is worth staying for four to five days at least because it has so much to offer, including the very popular Great Barrier Reef. Now let's get to how you can spend your time effectively in each of these cities in the east coast of Australia. For our east coast Australian itinerary, we first flew down from India to Sydney. We spent three days in Sydney. We stayed in a locality called Surrey Hills, which is approximately a kilometer away from the Sydney Central Station. It's important that you stay in the core business district of Sydney. It helps you with great access to all modes of transport like bus, tram, ferries and local trains. It's also important to be closer to all the critical spots as it saves you a lot of time in commute. In the three days, we spent a day visiting the Circular Quay and the Sydney Opera House. After that, we headed to the Manly Beach. On the second day, we went to Bondi Beach and Do not miss the bird show in Toronga Zoo. For more details about things to do in Sydney, travel hacks and tips, do watch this detailed video from us. While everybody covers the key spots in Sydney, we would recommend that you set aside a day to explore the Blue Mountains National Park, which is two hours away from Sydney and can be covered by train. For more details about things to do in Blue Mountains National Park, check out this detailed video. While you are in Sydney, all places are doable by public transport. There is an extensive network to reach all these places, so we would recommend not to have any rental cars. One, it saves you on cost and two, there is no hassle of finding parking spots and managing them. Now, your Australia trip shouldn't be just about experiencing the big bustling cities, but also about experiencing road trips and smaller towns. So, we rented a car from Apex Car Rentals and drove down from Sydney to Jervis Bay. Jervis Bay is popular for whale watching and dolphin watching. We stayed in this quaint town called Husky Sun in the Jervis Bay Motel. Jervis Bay offers a lot of nice walking tracks along the ocean and also access to the whitest beach on earth, which is Heian's Beach. National parks are another attraction near Jervis Bay. We covered Boodiri National Park and Muramarang National Park. This is where you can catch kangaroos hopping about freely on the beach. For more details about our Jervis Bay trip, check out our detailed video on the channel. We drove from Jervis Bay to Sydney and then we flew to Proserpain Airport. Proserpain is one of the two gateways to reach Whitsundays. For folks staying in one of the Whitsunday islands like Hamilton, flying directly into Hamilton Island makes more sense. For folks staying on the mainland, Proserpain is the better gateway. We tried to stay in Airlie Beach, which is the more popular town. However, the affordable options were sold out by the time we were looking and booking for stays. Hence, we decided to stay in a nearby beautiful quaint little town called Bowen. In Bowen, we stayed in the Whitsundays Sands Resort, which overlooks the Horseshoe Beach. The key attraction in Whitsundays is the White Haven Beach. It is known for its silica sand deposits, which give it a very white velvety texture. We booked with Red Cat Adventures for our day excursion. We had a great time with them and we definitely recommend you booking with them. For a detailed overview of our Whitsundays adventure, check out our video. Our next stop was Cairns. It is an 8-hour drive from Airlie Beach to Cairns. The drive is very scenic and beautiful as it runs parallel to the east coast of Australia and is totally worth it. Do make sure that you have enough time in Cairns as there are a lot of things to do. If you want to save one time, you can of course fly down from Airlie Beach to Cairns, but we definitely recommend this stretch as a road trip drive. Cairns is mainly popular because it is the gateway to the Great Barrier Reef. Make sure you time your dive appropriately because you are not allowed to fly out after 24 hours from the time of diving. We booked our dive with Diver's Den. We had a good experience with them. We had guided dives. Great Barrier Reef is definitely worth all the hype. We caught turtles, big clams, of course a lot of colorful corals. We booked three dives with them and it was very cost effective. They also provide lunch on board along with all the diving equipment that you need. The second attraction in Cairns, which we had no expectations at all from, was the drive around the Atherton Tablelands. It is popular for its waterfall circuit, which has a couple of waterfalls in close vicinity. Mila Mila Falls, which is Australia's most photographed waterfall, was definitely a good attraction. Next day, we headed to the Kuranda Rainforest. It's one of the world's oldest rainforests and if you are a train fan, you must do this scenic rail journey which starts all the way from Cairns Central and does a two-hour ride uphill to Kuranda. The sky rail down gives you a beautiful view of the coral sea and is totally worth it. Our last day in Cairns was just for chilling around and exploring things in and around the city. So in the first half, we just enjoyed spending time in the Esplanade pool in the Cairns Marina. In the second half, we drove along the Captain Cook Highway. It provides beautiful views of the coral sea. For more details about Cairns, check out our detailed videos. Moving on to costs, if you book a non-refundable flight from Bangalore to Sydney well in advance, it costed us somewhere around 50,000 per person. As far as a good accommodation in a central locality is concerned in Australia, the rates average somewhere around 9,000 to 10,000 rupees per night. In Sydney, we stayed in Surrey Hills in an Airbnb which had all the good amenities and close proximity to Sydney Central. In Jarvis Bay, we stayed in Jarvis Bay Motel. Both were roughly costing around 9,000 rupees per night. As far as Bowen is concerned, we stayed in Whitsunday Resort which costed us around 8,000 per night. In Cairns, we stayed in the Cairns Central area near the hospital in a hotel called as Cairns Queenslander Hotel. It was a very well maintained spacious room and was totally worth the money for its location. It costed us around 8,000 per night. All put together, for food plus accommodation and flights, it will cost you somewhere close to 2 to 2.5 lakhs. Outside this, you have to plan for all the activities. Whale watching costs you around 75 dollars per person. This is the standard rate across all the operators in Jarvis Bay. Skew bar diving in the Great Barrier Reef will cost you around 200 dollars per dive. It's more cost effective if you do three dives. It costed us 270 dollars per person for three dives. The Kuranda Scenic Railway will cost you around 120 dollars per person which includes the Skyrail as well. Rest of it will be for fuel and car rental charges. Car rentals are quite high in Australia and they'll be somewhere around 8,000 to 10,000 per day. We recommend you to choose wisely on which are all the towns and days on which you need car rental. For places like Sydney and Cairns, we recommend that you not need a rental car. Use rental cars only for places where you need to drive down to the outskirts or to a remote place. Net net, we were able to cover Australia in around four lakhs overall for two people with good coverage of two weeks and with all the related activities that one must do in the East Coast. While applying for the visa, we checked the Australian visa website. We were applying from India. The website mentioned that they take about roughly 100 working days going to high application volume. However, we were lucky. We got a visa in about roughly eight to nine working days. We have also had seen a lot of cases where people have got it in roughly between one to three working days as well. What we inferred was that if you have had prior foreign travel exposure in your passport, then the chances of you getting an Australian travel visa quickly was higher. However, do keep in mind that visa processing might take time. So, plan your airline and hotel bookings once you have the visa in hand. Do keep in mind that you don't have to book your flight tickets for getting an Australian visa. So, first have your visa in hand or at least a rough ETL when your visa is on top and post which you can book your flight tickets. That will ensure that you have flexibility on when to book and also the charges of whether to book a cancellable flight or a refundable one. The only thing you need is an itinerary as well as booked basis of stay. That's what will be needed by the visa council. One good thing about our visa was that it came with the validity of three years. So, hey, that means we can enter Australia any number of times within two or three years. But it's not guaranteed. It depends on a case to case basis. Irrespective, do plan ahead for your visa so that you don't miss out on any last minute meals etc. Now, coming to the last section and kind of important section which is food. So, food in Australia is not a problem at all. If you're a vegetarian like us, you get a lot of vegetarian options in all restaurants. In fact, there are a lot of vegan restaurants. We have a lot of delicious vegetarian pizzas everywhere. Again, if you are not so sure, you can always rely on subway outlets which are pretty much everywhere in the cities. And that was all about our Australian trip. If you're planning for Australia, don't worry about it. It's totally doable with your own planning. You don't need to go after a travel operator. It's a very good city for travel. People are very friendly and you can pretty much manage on your own. So, get to planning and have a great trip in Australia. So, that was all for today's video. Do like, share and subscribe our channel H2Pipe. We're also there on Instagram in case you want to DM us about any travel queries. We post there about daily travel inspiration. So, do follow us there as well. Thank you. See you until next time. Bye-bye.