Australia has been at the top of my travel bucket list for as long as I can remember. I’m not exactly sure why. Maybe it was the Great Barrier Reef that caught my eye? Maybe it was the Australian accents? Maybe because it was so far away and different from home? I don’t know what it was. But for some reason, I was just infatuated with the idea of going there. I almost tried studying abroad there at some point during my college years but alas, it was just too expensive.

Now that I’m older, can (semi) afford it, and can convince friends to go with me, I saw my opportunity to go and I snatched it.

We wanted to go during Australia’s summer months (December – February), and since we saw an amazing deal for February, ($1450, as compared to its average $1900+ fares) we decided that’s when we would go. Not that $1400 is cheap – believe me, I will probably be eating cereal for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the rest of the year, but it was the lowest I had ever seen it go from JFK to SYD. So it was a done deal.

I was so excited for this trip that I had begun planning for it before I even finished planning for my Italy trip (which was 5 months before Australia). So you know the feeling of wanting something for so long, and then when you finally get it, it doesn’t live up to its hype? Well, this was nothing like that. At all. Australia was so much more than I expected.

Now that I’ve visited the land down under (February 16 to February 28, to be exact), it’s still at the top of my travel bucket list. There are so many parts of the country that are still waiting for me to explore. Even for the cities I’ve visited, there’s so much more for me to see. I feel like you need to visit a place at least twice in your lifetime in order to get the full experience. The first time would be to just be a tourist. Go and see all the ‘must-see’ places. Take all of the touristy pictures. Eat all of the foods you’ve heard about that locals probably don’t even eat. The second time around, is when you really get to explore it. You’ve gotten most of the touristy things out of the way already, so now you can go visit all of the off-the-beaten-path places. You can go see all the things you might have missed out on the first time around. If only the flight to Australia wasn’t 23 hours and so incredibly expensive, I would be there again in a heartbeat. Now would be the perfect time for me to learn how to time travel or invent a time machine. But since that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen anytime soon, I’ll just leave you with a couple of my favorite pictures I took throughout the trip in Sydney, Melbourne, and Cairns.