Qantas fly 28 times a week from the UK to The Far East, Australia
and New Zealand
Qantas fly to 7 main gateways in Australia from the UK - Sydney,
Perth, Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane, Darwin and Cairns.
The Qantas Group network provides access to over 50 internal Australian
destinations
Qantas is a member of the oneworld alliance. Together the route
network of all oneworld airlines offers services to close to 700
destinations in more than 150 countries.
Qantas offer a range of easy to book flexible Walkabout fares, designed
to meet the needs of every traveller.
Adding the Walkabout Pass to any international Qantas or British
Airways fare provides travellers with access to over 50 Australian
and 4 New Zealand internal destinations.
Singapore Air needs little introduction,
they have a long established reputation as being a great way to
fly.
Singapore Airlines operates passenger services to
63 cities in 35 countries around the world, and flies to five
Australian cities; Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.
Their new super jumbo A380 flies to Melbourne and Sydney.
And ofcourse you can take advantage of the stopover
in Singapore to explore this amazing exotic city !
Chances are you will be visiting New Zealand
too while you are in Australia.
Air
New Zealand could be a good choice to combine your flights
to Australia and New Zealand! From Asia and the USA you can
fly straight in to Sydney, Melbourne and Perth, and from New
Zealand you can also fly in to Cairns, the Gold Coast, Brisbane
and Adelaide.
Virgin
Atlantic has great deals to Australia flying daily to Sydney
via Hong Kong from the UK, USA and Europe.
KLM Royal Dutch Airlines has some great
deals to fly you to five Australian airports.
They depart from their home port of Amsterdam
in the Netherlands (or any of their other 90 destinations around
Europe) to the Australian cities of Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne,
Perth and Sydney, via Kuala Lumpur or Singapore.
International budget airfares to Australia from
the USA
Looking for an airfare out of the USA to
Australia? Los Angeles to Sydney , New York to Sydney, for any
flights from the US to Australia go to Airfare.com
to find a good deal !
Another one to try is Allcheapfares.com
:
Cruise to Australia
Jump on a cruise ship in New Zealand and arrive
in style in Australia, Cruisedirect has a choice of cruises:
Alternative ways of reaching Australia;
Row your boat to Australia - This
is not for the faint hearted, and not recommended for those on
tight time schedules, but Dutchman Ralph Tuijn has left Peru in
March 2007 to cross the Pacific Ocean at its widest point - solo.
The 16,000-kilometer crossing will not make use of any motorised
or wind-related power. This extreme challenge was planned to take
between 7 and 9 months to complete and to be non-stop, without
re-supplies or any other support. You could follow this crazy
adventure on his
website. Last update: after rowing 7592 miles in
16 months Ralph landed in Papua New Guinea on 18 July 2008, something
must have gone wrong with his navigation as he ended up slightly
north of the target Brisbane (about 4000 km).
Ultra-light planes are ususally
only flown on short distances but Colin Boduill flew an ultra-light
Mainair Blade 912 from London to Sydney. He survived a few unscheduled
landings in oceans and rice paddies but managed to complete the
journey. On his Australian arrival in Darwin, Northern Territory,
he was handed a cold beer before he even managed to get out of
his seat.
Hang around the bar of the yacht club in Colon at
the east-end of the Panama Canal around May. This is a time when
many round-the -world sailors pass through on their way to Australia.
I got on a sailing boat as crew there in 1990
and we spent a very enjoyable six months cruising the South Pacific
islands to reach Australia. If your time is more limited try picking
up a boat in Fiji, New Zealand or Bali.
The most impressive entry you could possibly make
is by Space Shuttle. The Darwin airport with
its long airstrip is officially a back-up landing strip for the
Space Shuttle should it ever run into a situation where it can
not make it home to the U.S.
Another way to get here on the cheap is to become
a sperm donor, recently the Reproductive Medicine Centre
in Albury, Victoria, advertised in the sports section of Canada's
Alberta Calgary University student newspaper offering sperm donors
a $7000 package of free return trip, accommodation for a fortnight
and a daily spending allowance. An avalanche of emails followed
from Canada, Russia and other countries so you might be too late
by now.
Another option no longer available is a free passage
after stealing a loaf of bread in England. A
petty crime like this in the 1700s was enough to land you on a
ship to Australia ( one way only). From 1788, when Captain Arthur
Phillip led the First Fleet of 11 ships with 736 convicts and
their guards into Sydney Harbour, until 1852 a total of 160,000
convicts received free travel to Australia.
One girl that did manage to get to Australia for
free was 11 year old Turkish girl Nuran Oruc. Many kids run away
from home at some point in their life but ususally do not get
very far. This girl however managed to sneak aboard a Lufthansa
flight in Germany and, without passport or ticket, got all the
way to Melbourne until Australian immigration officials caught
her. A very embarrassed Lufthansa flew her back home at their
expense.
Someone else also got to fly to Australia
for free, on a private jet that was paid for by the Aussie
Government. David Hicks was looking for adventure back in 2000
and was doing a bit of military training in Afghanistan. He was
enjoying himself until the Americans invaded and dragged him off
to Guantanamo Bay where he spend the next eight years. When the
Americans finally came to the conclusion that David was not a
terrorist the Aussie Government paid half a million dollars to
fly him home in a private jet!
Or work your way to Australia:
How NOT to
get to Australia
The first boat people from Vietnam arrived in Darwin
on 28th February, 1976.
Though Australia is usually willing to lend a hand to people in
trouble as is often demonstrated in international peace keeping
missions like East Timor and the Solomon Islands, the Government
became concerned with the trend that this first arrival set as
it was followed by a steadily growing stream of refugees, often
on un-seaworthy vessels run by unscrupulous people smugglers that
charged their clients huge sums of money. Quarantine was worried
about pests in the old wooden boats and boats were routinely burned
at sea as a precaution. One unlucky bunch of people landed their
boat in the Kimberleys, about as remote as you can get in north
Western Australia. They went ashore to look for a police station
to apply for asylum but they walked around for three weeks surviving
on a diet of grasshoppers until one of them was spotted by a station
hand on a cattle station.
The Australian National Anthem sings; for those who've come across
the seas, we've boundless plains to share. Though this anthem
was written in 1878 it is still up to date as new boat arrivals
are not housed in the city but held in centres in outback places
like Port Hedland and Woomera, about as remote as you could possibly
get. After the Tampa crisis other solutions were found to deal
with boat refugees where they were not allowed to land on Australian
soil for processing but instead they were taken to places like
Nauru and New Guinea where cash strapped governments were paid
handsomely to have processing centres on their islands, this became
known as "the Pacific Solution". Another processing
facility was built on the Australian Territory Christmas Island
and more recently there has been talk of processing people in
Indonesia.
In November 2004 31 year old Neil Melly from Canada
tried to buy a one way ticket to Australia at Los Angeles International
Airport, but as his credit card was not valid he did not get his
ticket.
He then made a second attempt to reach Australia by (yes, we're
not making this up), removing all his clothes, climbing over a
fence, and then ran across the tarmac stark naked and managed
to climb up the front wheel of the moving Qantas Jumbo and climbed
up into the wheel well of the plane. Luckily he was spotted by
airport staf and the plane was stopped and he was extracted from
the wheel well and arrested. If he had not been spotted he would
have either fallen out, been crushed when the wheels were retracted
or frozen up in the sky where temperatures drop to minus 50.
21-year-old German Tobi Gutt wanted to visit his
girlfriend in Sydney but unfortunately mistyped his destination
on a flight booking website. But instead of arriving in Australia
he found himself on a different continent where the weather was
noticable chillier. His airline ticket took him via the US city
of Portland, Oregon, to Billings, Montana. Only when he was about
to board a small commuter plane to Sidney – a mining town
of about 5000 people - did he realize his mistake!
