Flight Planning

It occours to me that perhaps I should do something to set the scene before I go on. Any trip to Australia requires a bit of forethought but as we were going to be there for a couple of months I decided to indulge in some serious planning; not least because there was a budget to be considered.

We were going to be travelling from Brazil so our first consideration was the flight. We could either go via Dubai or Santiago De Chile and Auckland. Both flights' total travelling time were extraordinarily long but going via New Zealand was several hours shorter. As I have a friend in Auckland, the next thing was to contact him and see if we shouldn't pop in for a swift half on the way. Andy informed us that we didn't dare omit his newly adopted homeland from our trip so a quick beer in the pub turned into an 11 day stopover. We were very pleased it did too.

So we ended up flying: Florianopolis to São Paulo; São Paulo to Santiago De Chile; Santiago De Chile to Auckland where e gratefully disembarked into a cold, foggy night to find Andy's place.

Whilst in NZ we only flew once from Rotorua to Christchurch. Then at the end of our whistlestop tour we flew from Dunedin to Brisbane, where I will pick up the story shortly. Just before I do, I shall mention the outline plan of our cross continent trip.
From Brisbane we planned to head up the coast to Rockhampton then turn left and drive across to Tenant Creek.
South from Tenant Creek we were going to head for the Red Centre to see Uluru (Ayers Rock) before returning to Alice Springs.
Catching the train, The Ghan, in Alice would take us north again to Darwin. After collecting another rental car in Darwin we would head off into Kakadu National Park.
Then it would be a doddle to pop across to Broome in Western Australia to have a quick paddle in the Indian Ocean before nipping off to Sydney, via Perth, to have a quick dekko at the Opera House.