It’s been my childhood dream to visit Australia, to see the unique wildlife and amazing places of this huge and isolated continent. As an ecologist and natural history photographer, I also felt for a long time that I had to see this country with my own eyes to observe the ancient egg-laying mammals and all kinds of marsupials and other peculiar wildlife in their natural habitat. Fortunately, Gabi also loves animals and interesting places, so we travel a lot together. When she was able to take a six-week long sabbatical from the company she works at, it was a no-brainer to decide where to go. Our destination was of course Australia. It was a once in a lifetime opportunity, so we wanted to make it count, and we intended to see as many wonderful places as possible. We love driving so it must have been a road trip. We wanted to visit various rainforests, beautiful coasts and obviously the red center of the country, the Australian Outback. Australia is a really vast country, therefore we had to include a small flight too, in order to spend as much time visiting the places we are interested in as possible. Needless to say, our time was not enough to go to every state of the country, but we are really happy with what we were able to see Down Under.

We arrived to Sydney, and after spending only one day in this huge city, we started our journey up north in our rental car. We had approximately two weeks to arrive to Cairns. During this long drive, we explored several national parks in the hope of seeing and photographing some of the unique Australian birds and mammals. From Cairns we sailed out to see the Great Barrier Reef, one of the most beautiful parts of Australia. Next day we flew to the Top End of the country. We rented a 4WD camper in Darwin to go on one of the biggest adventures of our life. In two weeks, we traversed across the Australian desert and camped under the Southern Cross. During this amazing journey, we checked out some of the most characteristic places of Australia. The final section of our trip started in Adelaide, where we replaced the adventure camper with a regular rental car and in about 10 days we drove back to Sydney. Naturally, we took the scenic route on the coast and up to the mountains, and we even climbed the highest point of the continent, the snow-capped Mount Kosciuszko that reaches 7310ft (2228m) above sea level. It was an epic journey and fortunately, I was able to take some nice photographs of the remarkable places and wildlife of Australia. In the coming weeks I plan to share those images and the stories behind them in separate blog posts.