How to get to Australia

 

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Emirates has an extensive network of over 100 destinations, which include Sydney, Melbourne, Perth and Brisbane. Many flights go via Dubai, giving you an great opportunity to explore this unique and exciting city, there is a great range of sightseeing tours on offer.

 

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 of course you can take advantage of the stopover in Singapore to explore this amazing exotic city !

 

Swiss Airlines flies to 72 destinations in 39 countries all over the world from its Zurich hub and the further Swiss international airports of Basel and Geneva.

 

 

Qatar Airways flies from many destinations all over the world to Melbourne

 

Virgin Atlantic has great deals to Australia flying daily to Sydney via Hong Kong from the UK, USA and Europe.

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 :

 

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!