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GLO GOES + TRAVEL | Travel
Trip to
Australia by Jaclyn Youhana Garver
The sun had just set, and no one was permitted a flashlight except the guide. No flash photography, no glowing cell phone screens. Then, coming from the ocean, Pam Leffers saw the little penguins, waddling right up to shore for the evening. These penguins, Eudyptula minor, are the smallest of all penguins. They grow to be about 15 ½ inches high and weigh just over 2 pounds. They swim on the continental shelf and visit the same family borough every single night. After a few passed, Leffers thought, “Well, that’s cool.” Then hundreds more came to shore. She calls the experience one of her favorites from her trip to Australia, where she traveled last fall with her husband. “Visiting Australia had been on [my husband’s] bucket list for years,” Leffers said, but she had never considered a visit to the continent. He’s not a huge planner, so Leffers studied up on Australia: She read “In a Sunburned Country,” Bill Bryson’s travel memoir about Australia. She loved it. She picked up a Lonely Planet guidebook. Before long, she was as excited about the trip as her husband.
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Over the couple’s month-long visit, they saw a range of locales across the country. According to Leffers, this sort of city hopping around a mass as large as Australia—it’s about 2,500 miles wide, or the distance from Seattle to Boston—isn’t too difficult once you’re on the continent, because flights across Australia are so inexpensive.
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They took full advantage of that fact: • They started in Sydney, on Australia’s southeastern coast along the Tasman Sea. It’s Australia’s largest city. • They hopped up inland to Queensland, which is not far from the Great Barrier Reef. • Then they went across the country to Perth, the capital of Western Australia. Perth is called the most isolated city in the world, sandwiched between the Australian outback on one side and the Indian Ocean on the other. • They hugged the coast east and south to reach Adelaide, on the Great Australian Bight, the open bay nestled in Australia’s southern belly. • Then there was the weekend trip to Kangaroo Island, which they reached by ferry, and the drive inland to Barossa Valley, Australian wine country. • They visited their nephew studying in Melbourne (Australia’s cultural capital) and spent an afternoon in Tasmania (home to gourmet food, bushwalking, beer, wine, whiskey and wildlife including, yes, the Tasmanian devil).
“I was surprised by how different each area of the country was,” Leffers said. “We probably went to nearly every big city’s botanical garden. The foliage was different. The topography was different.” The two days driving across the Great Ocean Road, which stretches across the southern part of the state of Victoria, was a highlight. “If you can imagine beautiful ocean views and these huge rock formations changing over time,” Leffers said. “It’s scary to drive. In a lot of places, you’re on a winding road with no sides up to the top of a mountainous area.” a
