Now the first thing I want to say is that Australia is BIG. Not just a little bit big, it’s huge! Being British means that you’ll struggle to fully comprehend the size until you travel Australia for yourself. I usually visit Scotland once a year with my family and the drive of 4 hours seems like a long trip, so you can understand why I had difficulty grasping how I could travel on a bus for 30 hours without even leaving the state.

Me and my boyfriend were based in Canberra and knew we wanted to travel along the east coast. Because we’d left it until the last minute to book anything, flights were looking a bit pricey and we also didn’t want to be restricted by our schedule. We looked into coaches (coaches and buses seem to be classed as the same thing in Australia) and Greyhound seemed to offer us the sort of flexibility we were looking for as we could hop on and off where we wanted and they had buses departing all the time.

I bought a mini-traveller valid from Cairns to Melbourne which cost me $472 (2009 price), which I don’t think is too bad to travel all those kilometres. The only restraint was that we could only travel in one direction, so from Cairns to Melbourne or Melbourne to Cairns.

Bus Travel

After flying to Cairns, we spent about a week exploring the area close-by then decided we should probably carry on as we only had two months. I was looking at the timetable on the Greyhound website and thought I was doing some really bad maths trying to calculate when we’d arrive in Brisbane. No, my maths was fine, it really was going to take 30 hours. We quickly decided that travelling that distance in one go was not an option and decided to break it up as close to half-way as we could.

We travelled through the night to Mackay, which took 12 hours and 50 minutes, and stayed the night in a budget hotel. We then got the bus to Brisbane the following evening which took 16 hours and 50 minutes. Ouch.

We were lucky enough to have the time to spend a night to break up the journey. If you have time-restrictions, I would advise you to fly. I thought by flying I might miss out on the scenery or something, but after 16 hours on a coach, you couldn’t care less if a family of kangaroos was waving you by.

Useful tips if you are doing a lot of bus travel:

  • Take food and drink. You aren’t supposed to eat on the buses but you don’t always know where the next stop is going to be, and you’ll just drive whoever you’re travelling with mad with your whinging
  • Take something to entertain you, like a book or game
  • Ear plugs or an iPod can help block out any noise if you’re trying to get some sleep
  • Don’t clock watch. Time will seem to stand still if you’re constantly checking it

 

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