Top 10 Things To Do in Australia

Australia Word Cloud

Australia Word Cloud

I’m going to be in Australia for the first time in my life in about eight months and I want to know the Top 10 things to do in Australia. Again, I’m going to go and visit my old friend Tripadvisor, along with the rest of the Travel Consolidator team. Tripadvisor says that it likes  Sydney Harbour, the Australian War MemorialBondi to Coogee Beach Coastal WalkKings Park & Botanic Garden (Perth), the Sydney Opera HouseThe Great Ocean Road (Torquay), the Sydney Harbour Bridge The Opera House to the Botanic Gardens Walk (Sydney), the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG), and the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne. What I think is a shame is that Uluru (Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park) got bounced to some obscure place way down the list.

The Fodor website thinks that the “Top Things to Do in Australia” are the Tasmanian Wilderness, Fraser Island, Sydney Opera House, the Blue Mountains, the Great Barrier Reef, Uluru, the Wet Tropics of Queensland, Purnululu National Park and Kakadu National Park. You’ll have to do a little searching of their site to find each attraction. The don’t specifically link the the URL when they provide the list.

At Frommer’s there is a list of the site’s favorite experiences in Australia. They are the Great Barrier Reef, Experiencing Sydney, Exploring the Wet Tropics Rainforest, Bareboat Sailing, Exploring Kata Tjuta & Uluru and Taking an Aboriginal Culture Tour. Once again, you’ll have to do a little searching of their site to find each attraction on their website. The do not include direct links in their write-up on top things to do in Australia.

Sydney Opera House

Sydney Opera House by Diliff

VirtualTourist has the following as the first ten items in the section on things to do in Australia. The are Sydney Opera HouseKings ParkSouthbankAustralian War MemorialGreat Ocean RoadHahndorfWarner Bros. Movie WorldLitchfield National Park – Day TripGreat Barrier Reef and Geelong Waterfront. VirtualTourist, like Tripadvisor, has a lot of user generated content.

Lonely Planet lists The Great Barrier Reef, Bondi Beach, the Sydney Opera House, the Daintree RainforestQueensland Cultural Center, Queen Victoria Market, Royal Botanic GardensState Library of Victoria, Birrarung Marr and Kings Park & Botanic Garden.

Planetware likes this list: Melbourne Cricket Grounds, Royal Botanical Gardens, the Shrine of Remembrance, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Central Shopping Center, Royal Arcade, Queen Victoria Market, Surfer’s Paradise, the Great Barrier Reef, Fraser Island, New Parliament Building, Kakadu National Park, Great Ocean Road, Alice Springs, Ayers Rock, Sydney Harbour Bridge, and the Sydney Opera House.

My final travel guide, Wikitravel, has some different tourist attractions than some of the other travel guides.  They listed seeing the flora and fauna of the island as being something that you can’t see anywhere else in the world and I would have to agree. They gave some specific locations for viewing a various species that are unique to Australia. They also listed landmarks such as Uluru, the Sydney Harbor Bridge and the Sydney Opera House. They finished up with a discussion that focused on sports in Australia. They listed a sampling of some fo the sporting events that were available in Australia. Wikitravel certainly took a different slant than the other travel guides.

Australian Outback - Fitzgerald River NP

Outback – Fitzgerald River NP by Yewenyi

Notice that there was not a clear cut consensus as to what the Top 10 attractions are in Australia. I found that a bit surprising. I would have thought that there would have been a bit more consensus as to what the Top 10 attractions were. Well, at least it gives me a bigger selection from which to choose. Now do I think think the top travel guides got it right? Yes and no. I didn’t really see where any travel guide made a point out of the legendary Australian Outback. Nor did I see a mention of Kings Canyon. I did see one mention of Kakadu, a National Park in the Northern Territory where there is evidence of Aboriginal occupation for a long as forty thousand years.

Another interesting tourist attraction, Lord Howe Island, was not mentioned by anyone. This is a group of volcanic islands that are approximately 350 miles east of Australia. It has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage site and is said to have some very unique species of plants and animals. The island was uninhabited until colonized by the United Kingdom in the late eighteenth century. Today it has a population of less than four hundred residents and is primarily a tourist attraction with a limit of no more than four hundred tourists on the island at any one time.

I also found it curious that any mention of the any of the Australian Convict Sites. I found that odd since the colony’s founding was a direct result of Britain needing somewhere to relocate the people they deemed unworthy of living in Britain. While it is said that there are over  over 3,000 convict sites remaining in Australia, eleven penal sites constitute the UNESCO World Heritage list for the Australian Convict Sites. According to Wikipedia, “The last convict ship, the Hougoumont, left Britain in 1867 and arrived in Western Australia on 10 January 1868. In all, about 164,000 convicts were transported to the Australian colonies between 1788 and 1868 on board 806 ships.”

Just remember that Australia is a big place. It’s the sixth largest country in the world. You can’t see it in a week or two. My problem is that I have to decide what I want to see in Australia in the approximately two weeks that I plan on being there. Fortunately I now have a better idea of what’s there.