Wonder what it costs to wander around in the “red center” of Australia these days? Since we did that recently, I can give you a bit of information.
There are ways to do our trip for less than we spent, probably, especially if you’re a young backpacker travelling with friends. And there are lots of ways to spend much more than we did if you choose the luxurious digs that claim to be five-star rated and if you accept their offers of $49 per person buffets and $30 breakfasts.
Packaged tours, which put you on a bus with others and with a guide, can cost plenty. One three-day tour of Uluru (Ayers Rock), Kata Tjuta (the Olgas), and King’s Canyon was advertised for $540 per adult. The two of us spend four nights in those places for less than half that.
Plus travel, of course.
We wanted to hike when and where we chose, so we rented (or in Aussie terms, “hired”) a car so we could be independent. We made our arrangements by using the Internet and a fine travel agent here, Kim at Fairfield Travel.
Here are our travel costs for a full week:
Rental car — Hertz rented us a mid-size Toyota (a no-charge upgrade from the cheapest car on offer, which we’d reserved) with unlimited mileage at Ayers Rock Airport. We drove it about a thousand kilometres or 600 miles and returned it seven days later to the Alice Springs Airport. Cost: $630.
Fuel – Driving from Ayers Rock to Alice Springs via Kings Canyon and making side trips west of and east of Alice Springs to see the McDonnell Mountains, with the cost approaching AU$2 per liter or nearly US$7 per gallon, we spent $200 on petrol or gasoline.
Fees — The only park entry fee we encountered on this trip was for Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park: $25 per person, good for three days. Our visit to the Alice Springs Telegraph Station museum cost us $7.50 each.
Certainly vacations such as this are a luxury, not something everyone can afford to take even if they live relatively close by, only half a continent away, as we now do. We were worried about the news of Qantas flight cut-backs, but our plans held up. This time. Who knows how long such trips will be feasible for us or for anyone?
As is the case in the United States, where members of our families are spending more than $100 to fill their gas tanks sometimes with fuel costing US$4 per gallon, people here are worried about not only the cost of fuel, but also about what it will costs the country long-term to respond constructively to the threat of global warming.
We contributed to pollution in the atmosphere by flying Qantas from Brisbane to Sydney to Ayers Rock, driving, and flying back, Alice Springs to Brisbane. We know we are blessed to have been able to get to know this part of Australia first hand.
In the US, warnings about this energy crisis have been ignored for 30 years. As in Washington, Australian politicians in the national capital, Canberra, are obviously reluctant to take the unpopular steps which will be required to turn environmental trends around.
If we are able to look back a few decades from now with pride and relief (and still take vacations to nice places), it will be because a few of our leaders of this era stood tall in the way FDR and Churchill did in World War II. For now, though, we’re getting a lot of dithering and poll watching.
So, thank goodness for humour, even when it’s a bit pointed. OzinAmerica, a Yahoo group for Australians living in the US, included, this week, the following submission from a reader named Robyn:
“A lot of folks can’t understand how we came to have an oil shortage here in Australia. Well, there’s a very simple answer. Nobody bothered to check the oil. We just didn’t know we were getting low.
“The reason for that is purely geographical. Our oil is located in Bass Strait, East Queensland Shale Fields, Canning Basin, Perth Basin, and the North-West Continental Shelf. Our dipsticks are located in Canberra!”
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Cath Lawson 07.13.08 at 10:55 am
Hi Bob - it sounds like you had a great cheap and saved a great deal of money.
It’s interesting to know how much it costs to travel within Australia. As you know, I’m considering moving there and I need to take all these things into account.
The car rental seems kind of pricey. Is this just because of the type of vehicle you rented and the fact that you were dropping it off at a different place to where you picked it up?
Cath Lawsons last blog post..Why I Don’t Like Zen Habits
Bob 07.14.08 at 11:16 am
Cath, you may be right about the cost of the Hertz hire car we rented. It turns out that — at Ayers Rock Airport at least — you don’t save money by returning the car there. Sometimes, it’s quite the opposite.
Checking on-line for a 7-day rental today, I found a special deal that I didn’t see when we were planning our trip, a deal that makes me think Hertz has a problem with too many people picking up cars in Alice Springs and dropping them off at the Ayers Rock Airport.
Here’s what I found. The best price I saw for a week’s rental from Ayers Rock Airport with a return to the same place was for $636 with 700 kilometers with each extra kilometer costing .25 cents. Since we drove at least 1,000k, that rate would have come to $700 for the week for us.
But the rate is much cheaper if we wanted to drive to Alice Springs Airport and leave the car there, which is what we did. Now, in the official tourist season, Hertz would let me have a full-size Toyota with 500 free miles for $212, a total charge of $436 for 1000k of driving.
Hertz and discount sites offer even cheaper rates for a smaller car but then add a note: not available for on-line rental. (One discount site promised the $212 deal with “3500 kilometers free,” but I don’t believe that for a minute.)
So, a lesson: sometimes being somewhere in the busy season can have benefits. If we’d chosen to go in July instead of late June, though, any savings we’d have discovered on car rental would have been eaten up in a night or two through increased costs of lodging.
Thanks for the question. I was bothered by the car-hire cost, too, and your reply to my blog gave me an excuse to investigate. Coming from the US, we find very little to be cheaper here, but salaries are higher, the health care system is wonderful, and we love or lives here. — Bob
Bob 07.14.08 at 11:18 am
Cath, you may be right about the cost of the Hertz hire car we rented. It turns out that — at Ayers Rock Airport at least — you don’t save money by returning the car there. Sometimes, it’s quite the opposite.
Checking on-line for a 7-day rental today, I found a special deal that I didn’t see when we were planning our trip, a deal that makes me think Hertz has a problem with too many people picking up cars in Alice Springs and dropping them off at the Ayers Rock Airport.
Here’s what I found. The best price I saw for a week’s rental from Ayers Rock Airport with a return to the same place was for $636 with 700 kilometers with each extra kilometer costing .25 cents. Since we drove at least 1,000k, that rate would have come to $700 for the week for us.
But the rate is much cheaper if we wanted to drive to Alice Springs Airport and leave the car there, which is what we did. Now, in the official tourist season, Hertz would let me have a full-size Toyota with 500 free miles for $212, a total charge of $436 for 1000k of driving.
Hertz and discount sites offer even cheaper rates for a smaller car but then add a note: not available for on-line rental. (One discount site promised the $212 deal with “3500 kilometers free,” but I don’t believe that for a minute.)
So, a lesson: sometimes being somewhere in the busy season can have benefits. If we’d chosen to go in July instead of late June, though, any savings we’d have discovered on car rental would have been eaten up in a night or two through increased costs of lodging.
Thanks for the question. I was bothered by the car-hire cost, too, and your reply to my blog gave me an excuse to investigate. Coming from the US, we find very little to be cheaper here, but salaries are higher, the health care system is wonderful, and we love our lives here. — Bob
Bob 07.14.08 at 11:19 am
Cath, you may be right about the cost of the Hertz hire car we rented. It turns out that — at Ayers Rock Airport at least — you don’t save money by returning the car there. Sometimes, it’s quite the opposite.
Checking on-line for a 7-day rental today, I found a special deal that I didn’t see when we were planning our trip, a deal that makes me think Hertz has a problem with too many people picking up cars in Alice Springs and dropping them off at the Ayers Rock Airport.
Here’s what I found. The best price I saw for a week’s rental from Ayers Rock Airport with a return to the same place was for $636 with 700 kilometers with each extra kilometer costing .25 cents. Since we drove at least 1,000k, that rate would have come to $700 for the week for us.
But the rate is much cheaper if we wanted to drive to Alice Springs Airport and leave the car there, which is what we did. Now, in the official tourist season, Hertz would let me have a full-size Toyota with 500 free miles for $212, a total charge of $436 for 1000k of driving.
Hertz and discount sites offer even cheaper rates for a smaller car but then add a note: not available for on-line rental. (One discount site promised the $212 deal with “3500 kilometers free,” but I don’t believe that for a minute.)
So, a lesson: sometimes being somewhere in the busy season can have benefits. If we’d chosen to go in July instead of late June, though, any savings we’d have discovered on car rental would have been eaten up in a night or two through increased costs of lodging.
Thanks for the question. I was bothered by the car-hire cost, too, and your reply to my blog gave me an excuse to investigate. Coming from the US, we find very little to be cheaper here, but salaries are higher, the health care system is wonderful, and we love our lives here.
– Bob
David 07.15.08 at 12:24 pm
We, wife and 14 year old daughter moved here from Seabrook, Texas back in Sep. 07′. Sticker shock is still a big thing to me along with the store hrs. No more 24-7 WalMarts, for sure. All in all it’s a easy going place to get along in. You just need to come with an open mind and most cases open wallet.
Bob 07.15.08 at 3:00 pm
Open mind, open wallet. Yep, both help. And you do have to pay attention to closing times. We were surprised to learn, when we moved here in June ‘05, that if you need to buy something after 4 p.m. you can be out of luck, most places, most days. Thanks for your comments. — Bob