Australians can’t wait to leave: outbound travel up 3X over 20 years

by Tom Johansmeyer on

It looks like the best place for vacation, if you’re Australian, is anywhere else. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, outbound travel surged from 2.1 million a year to 6.8 million a year over the past 20 years. For the 12 months ending last June, 6.8 million overseas trips originated in Australia. Two decades earlier, it was only 2.1 million. At today’s levels, there are 31 overseas trips made per 100 Australians.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports:

The ABS says the unprecedented increase is due to a combination of factors including more affordable travel and accommodation, partly due to the strength of the Australian dollar, and increasing competition between airlines.

What’s really interesting is that Australians are leaving the homeland for fun rather than profit: leisure travel was good for 82 percent of overseas trips.

So, if you’re Australian, where do you go? Well, New Zealand. The country’s neighbor attracted 1.1 million Australians.

[photo by Pascal Vuylsteker via Flickr]

Photo of the Day (9.28.10)

by Stephen Greenwood on
Does a 2,979km, 48 hour train ride across the Australian continent sound like your cup of tea? Then say hello the ‘The Ghan’ – Australia’s legendary passenger train that connects Darwin and the Northern Territory with Adelaide in South Australia. Completed in 1878, the service was nicknamed ‘the Afghan Express‘ as a homage to the many Afghan cameleers that supplied the construction of the railroad and telegraph lines in the harsh Australian desert.

The distinctive red locomotive and logo of the train is seen here thanks to Flickr user Kritta. Great shot!

If you’re in the region and riding in a train across the desert sounds too passive (and sane), then check out South Australia’s Simpson Bike Challenge! The race begins today and goes until October 2nd; covering over 590km of sand dunes and lots of other terrain you’d never want to bike through.

Round-the-world: Sydney’s sustainable design shops

by Alex Robertson Textor on

Increasingly, small independent shops are creating new aesthetics to pair up appropriately with eco-friendly and otherwise sustainable product and wares. Sydney boasts several boutiques that are in one or another way ahead of the global curve. Following are three shops, all opened within the past year or so, that merge sustainability, upcycling, and even a sense of community with retail purpose. These shops sell mostly portable objects. They are thus ideal places for visitor to Sydney to find gifts as well as usable household items.

Shelf/Life, a home furnishings store at 50 Reservoir Street in Surry Hills, is full of gorgeous little items yet somehow feels spacious and delicately filled. Opened in December 2009 by Jess Yee, Shelf/Life (see a photo of the after hours storefront above) focuses on strong design and craft both ethical and well-made. Standouts include letterpress greetings cards, fair trade crafts, handbags, recyclable polypropylene cups by Melbourne’s KeepCup, and handmade candles by Sydney’s own Gascoigne & King.

I Ran the Wrong Way, also in Surry Hills (at 378 Cleveland Street) takes a folksier approach. Opened last year by Melinda Tually, the shop’s tiny space is crammed with beautiful eco-friendly and fair trade items, like strikingly bold Cambodian fish feed bags that have been transformed via creative upcycling into laptop bags. Also of note is the shop’s jewelry collection, which is drawn from local and overseas sources both. Tually is an enthusiastically green-minded sort. Check out her shop’s impressive “eco creds” here.

A Coffee and A Yarn at 413 King Street in Newtown is another fantastic shop. A Coffee and A Yarn is exactly what is sounds like: a yarn shop that doubles as a café. The shop combines the current revivalism of the craft of knitting with an appealing and very social coffeehouse setting. During my visit, owner Ellie Teunissen led me through her yarns with beaming enthusiasm, pointing out several of Australian provenance. The icing on the cake? “We wanted to do a very good job with the coffee.” Mission accomplished.

Check out other posts in the Capricorn Route series here.

Round-the-world: Four days in Sydney

by Alex Robertson Textor on

The first four days of our round-the-world trip race by in a whirl of receipts, flat whites, great meals, urban hikes, and friendly Sydneysiders.

You’ll see that receipts head my list. Australia has become one expensive lucky country, make no bones about it. A late night dash to a convenience store for bottled water, a muesli bar, and biscuits sets us back AUD17 ($16). A copy of Monocle ($10 in the US). is priced at AUD20 ($19) at a bookstore in Sydney’s Newtown. My breakfast at Forbes & Burton (252 Forbes Street, Darlinghurst) a perfect cafe-restaurant, costs AUD18, not including coffee.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Fresh off Qantas 12, we check into our hotel, the Diamant Boutique Hotel Sydney at Kings Cross, with smart rooms and hallway lighting that stage-whispers discretion. Diamant Boutique is part of Eight Hotels, a small hotel chain with hotels in several Australian cities. The location, the attractive room design, the reasonable nightly rates for a boutique hotel ($161), and the Toby’s Estate coffee and pastries cart in the lobby are all strong pluses. The only minus of note is the annoying charge for Internet access in rooms, at AUD30 for two days of access. (Wireless Internet access in the lobby is free of charge.)

We spend our four days walking: through the Royal Botanic Gardens to the Sydney Opera House, across Surry Hills, Redfern, Paddington, Newtown, and Darlinghurst. One day we start out from Potts Point to Paddington and then continue all the way to Bondi Beach and then along the coastal walkway to Tamarama Beach, a pleasant five-mile stroll.


Bondi Beach on a late winter afternoon.

Newtown is probably the most interesting area in Sydney for new neighborhood watchers, a mish-mash of vintage shops both high-end and junky, a fantastic knitting café (about which more later), various hippie paraphernalia shops, one very fine bakery (Luxe Bakery at 195 Missenden Road, recommended by Australian travel journalist Tim Richards via Twitter after he noticed from my tweets that I was in Newtown), and a share of chain stores to keep things real. Luxe Bakery doesn’t appear to have a website, so I direct you to a beautiful post on the place at the fantastic food blog he needs food.We eat well in Sydney. There’s Fish Face (132 Darlinghurst Road, Darlinghurst) where we start our meal with incredible sugar-cured ocean trout, and The Battery, (425 Bourke Street, Surry Hills) another seafood restaurant, also good and quite a bit easier on the wallet than the former. There are decadent breakfasts at the aforementioned Forbes and Burton. There is Single Origin Roasters (60-64 Reservoir Street, Surry Hills) which pairs a great, very seasonal lunch with extremely detailed coffee bean nerdism. And then there’s Bodega.

There’s been a huge buzz around Sydney’s Bodega (216 Commonwealth Street, Surry Hills) for years. The tapas restaurant doesn’t take reservations, and we arrive at 5:45 pm in anticipation of the 6 pm opening. We may have been the first to congregate by the door, but by opening time there are 30 people waiting to be seated. Everyone is projecting a squirming politeness, which I take to signify a failure to embody actual patience. This is a good sign.

The meal is grand: thick local oysters; pumpkin and feta empanadas; beef empanadas; Spanish salami; fried cauliflower; a rich corn tamale; an octopus, chorizo, and potato salad. We end by sharing a banana split, a dessert with just the right amount of salt and tang to count as a fully transformed version of the original. Our waiter tells us the staff are excited about Porteño, the brand new Argentinian steak house opened last week by Bodega owners Elvis Abrahanowicz and Ben Milgate.

In terms of art and design as well as cuisine, Sydney teems with homegrown energy. There are tons of great shops across Sydney showcasing strong aesthetic direction and great curatorial instincts. I was especially excited by Object at the Australian Centre for Craft and Design (417 Bourke Street, Surry Hills) which features the work of designers and craft artists from across Australia. I was especially taken by the translucent resin bowls by Dinosaur Designs. Another great shop is the Artery (221 Darlinghurst Road, Darlinghurst) a gallery focused on contemporary Aboriginal art. We pop in and ask a few questions and proprietor Alesha Glennon provides a fascinating impromptu overview of Aboriginal art across the country. The Artery, which opened in 2005, specializes in part in work from the Utopia region, an area northeast of Alice Springs known for its female artists.

Next up: a trio of especially exciting, well-curated Sydney shops focused on sustainability in one or another form.

Check out other Capricorn Route series posts here.

Oprah fails to rescue Australian tourism

by Tom Johansmeyer on

Tourism is underwater in Australia, and it looks like even the most powerful woman in the world can’t turn it around. Originally, the country’s Tourism and Transport Forum thought Oprah Winfrey’s visit to Australia would be great for tourism, attracting visitors from around the world. Well, it looks like early expectations are being revisited. While Australians are still leaving the country on vacation in record numbers, the rest of the world isn’t returning the favor.

Overnight visits to Australia fell 1 percent for the year ending June 2010, according to the National Visitor Survey. But, visitor nights were up 0.4 percent and total spending climbed 1.9 percent – so, there is something of a silver lining here.

Before we decide that Oprah didn’t deliver, however, keep in mind that the number of visitors form the United States surged 8 percent. So, the talk show queen may still surprise the folks down under.

[photo by nayrb7 via Flickr]