Travelling Australia's Outback with Stonestreets

For New Zealanders looking for something completely different, it’s hard to go past the Australian Outback. It’s also not so easy to go through yourself!

It’s an expansive land that will re-set your ideas of distance. The beauty is of another place, of intense blue skies, vast white shimmering salt lakes, deep red sand dunes, gleaming black gibber-stone plains, spiny green-yellow spinifex, sudden forests of acacia, dusty flood channels, rocky mountain ranges and outcrops, eucalypt-framed waterholes and the occasional ‘to-die-for’ hot steaming springs.

Nature rules out in the Outback. As well as severe heat and frosty cold, winds can whip up dust storms and even a sudden shower can close a road for days. Getting ‘stuck’ in the Outback can challenge and even be life-changing for city-bred travelers. Before HF radios and the Flying-Doctor it could even be life-threatening.


 
With rains and floods come carpets of wildflowers of many varieties and colour. But it can be decades between big showers and the best shows! In the isolated ‘Corner-Country’ about the border of New South Wales, South Australia and Queensland, right now in the autumn-winter of 2011 locals are claiming the best bloom since 1974!

The birdlife is insane: flocks of bright green budgerigars in a patch of forest beside a creek; flights of pink-grey Major Mitchell galahs; squawking red-tailed black cockatoos; massed pelicans on Outback lakes; and the lord of the skies, the wedge-tailed eagle patrolling from high. Such is the proliferation, the organization Birds Australia actually buys up and manages former cattle-stations in the Outback to create sanctuaries.

Across Australia’s interior run a handful of squiggly tracks for the infrequent traffic, iconic camel-padded trails etched with the trials of the past; among them the Birdsville Track, Oodnadatta Track, the Gunbarrel, Strezlecki Track, Canning Stock Route and Tanami Road.

And Thank God for Outback Pubs! Dating from the time of explorers, swaggies and squatters, these iconic outposts of humanity and hilarity are often the only structure to mark a map location. Like joining lines and dots, the Outback tracks lead the traveler from one pub to another. It sure makes for beaut traveling.

Which all leads to the big question, “How does one travel such a Big Country?”


 
The answer to is Stonestreets 4x4 coach tours!

Every year Stonestreet’s Coaches run an exciting series of adventure tours in their mighty 2009 model German-engineered M.A.N. 4x4 coach. It takes only 26 passengers (small groups so book early!) and tours may be accommodated or camping. Outback accommodation is an eclectic mix of station-stays, cabins, bush pubs, above and underground motels and grand old hotels. All meals (or almost all) are included.

Stonestreets 2011 programme of Outback tours include:

• 4x4 Brisbane to Adelaide via Lake Eyre (April)

• 4x4 Overland to Cape York (May, June)

• 4x4 Historic Outback Pubs and Corner-Country Wildflowers (July)

• 4x4 East to West and West to East along the Gunbarrel (August, September)

• Rugged Outback, Adelaide to Brisbane via Flinders Ranges and Corner-Country by luxury coach (October)

2012 will see many of these tours repeated and a selection of new itineraries.

Stonestreets also operate many tours in luxury coaches exploring Queensland, the South-East, Top End and sometimes Western Australia and Tasmania.

In September-October 2011, the ‘South-East Circle’ comprises 6 sections that can be taken in any combination:

1. ‘The East Coast’ Brisbane to Sydney featuring a 3 day Sydney Harbour cruise;
2. ‘The South-East Coast’ Sydney to Melbourne including Phillip Island;
3. ‘The Shipwreck Coast’ Melbourne to Adelaide via the Great Ocean Road;
4. ‘The Island Coast’ Barossa Valley and Kangaroo Island;
5. ‘The Peninsula Coast’ SA’s iconic Yorke and Eyre Peninsulas;
6. ‘The Rugged Outback’ Adelaide to Brisbane via Flinders Ranges.

For lawn bowlers Stonestreets have two tours between Brisbane and Adelaide in Nov-Dec 2011 for the Asia-Pacific Championships. The tours will feature social matches against the locals enroute, a number of wine regions and scenic attractions like the Grampians and Flinders Ranges.


 
Stonestreets Coaches are South-East Queensland’s leading extended touring and coach charter company while still being a family-owned business.

We’d love to roll the red-carpet across ‘the ditch’ to invite new Kiwi friends to join our tours. Our travelers to date are 99% Aussies and we’re confident Aussies and Kiwi travelers will hit it off together. We might just add that we don’t have plans to follow the big-brand tour companies chasing the global markets for their Australian tours.

Clubs and groups are also welcome to discuss their Australia travel plans with us.

Please email us to ask any questions and receive our quarterly email newsletter.

Phone: 61-7-46875555
Email: info@stonestreetscoaches.com.au
Website: www.milestonestours.com.au

Stonestreets Coaches
78 Warwick Street
Toowoomba Queensland 4350

Wildflower and pub photographs are courtesy of Tibooburra’s Kim Piddington and Family Hotel.
 
 

Published 25th May 2011

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