Wine, water and wildlife
Practically on the outskirts of Adelaide, the Fleurieu Peninsula is South Australia’s most popular and accessible holiday destination, famous for its wine, gourmet produce, breathtakingly scenic coastline and wildlife. The best way to explore the Fleurieu Peninsula is on a three or four-day circular drive that for the most part, follows the dramatic coastline, where grassy hills spill into the sea over sheer rocky cliffs...

Climbing Mount Gower
There’s no ignoring Mount Gower on Lord Howe Island, a tiny speck of an island 550km east of Port Macquarie.  Wherever you look, its brooding presence is there, sometimes standing tall and proud and naked, sometimes shrouded in cloud.  Wherever you go on the island, Mount Gower looms larger than life. The rocky flat-topped peak’s image is on all the postcards, in all the books, its likeness stamped on all the souvenirs, incorporated into most of the logos of the island’s businesses, printed on all the t-shirts.  Including mine, which says “I climbed Mount Gower, and survived.”...

The Savannah Way
A few years ago a trip across the top of Australia, through the Gulf country of western Queensland and the rugged Kimberley in the west was a tough and arduous journey, across rough tracks that were impassable to anything other than a heavy duty 4WD.  But with the recent upgrading of the trans-continental Savannah Way, the breathtakingly beautiful landscape of the north is now open for all to enjoy, even those without a 4WD... 

Kwiambal and Kings Plains
Tucked away in the north-west corner of the New England tablelands are two hidden gems – Kwiambal and Kings Plains national parks. Surrounded by rolling farmland these relatively newly-gazetted parks hide rocky woodlands and deep river gorges, calm waterholes and thundering waterfalls.  Best of all, both parks are remote enough, and new enough, that unless you’re there in peak holiday time, you’re pretty much guaranteed to have the place to yourself.  Even so, we camped at both over the New Year holiday period and were the only ones at Kings Plains, and shared the riverside campsite at Kwiambal with just two other families...