How to get to Australia
If your time is limited you'll want to fly
straight to Australia, but it is a good idea to break up the long
journey as you usually get at least one free stop-over on the way,
it also reduces your jetlag.
Flights from London to Sydney or Melbourne are a long haul so if
you can get a stop over in Asia to break the long flight then take
it. Although smaller cities like Cairns, Hobart and Darwin have
an international airport there are limited flights arriving there,
and you will often have to change flights in Brisbane, Sydney or
Melbourne. Nowadays there is stiff competition
on the internet to bring you the cheapest airfares, try the ones
below for a good deal;
Webjet is a great place to shop if you need
cheap flights, type in your date and destination and they will give
you all available airlines and prices on that day to compare and
make sure you got the best deal !
Airfare.com.au
is another good place to start looking for cheap airfares to Australia
and budget domestic airfares within Australia.
Browse and book budget flights online.
Virgin
Atlantic has great deals to Australia including some good round
the world airfares.
Directflights.com.au
is another great site to shop for budget airfares in and to Australia.
Virgin
Holidays offers great deals on airfares from the UK and Europe
to Australia
If you
live in the UK go to Flight.co.uk
for your budget flights
Thomas
Cook has over 163 years experience in travel arrangements, check
out their website for a good deal on budget flights and package
deals to Australia from the UK
Firstclass.com.au
is another great place to look for just about anything to do with
airfares and holidays, both in Australia and internationally.
If you live in the
USA try the convenient flight search engine of Airfare.com
to find yourself a good deal on an airfare from the USA to
Australia
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Alternative ways of reaching Australia;
Row your boat to Brisbane - 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 will take between 7 and
9 months to complete and will be non-stop, without re-supplies or
any other support. You can follow this crazy adventure on his
website.
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!
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!
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