Our own coming winter is the summer in Australia, the very best time of year for one of the great adventures of travel.
Whether your tastes lean to the sails of the Sydney Opera House and the wines of South Australia, or to the underwater life of the Great Barrier Reef and the crocodiles and kangaroos of the Outback, Australia is a cultural and natural wonderland.
But there's a problem: Australia is huge — a continent, not simply a country. You can't expect to see it all in a week, or to be able to drive quickly from one part to another, and you'll soon conclude that you must travel by air within Australia. A major reduction in the cost of such flights is what makes the Aussie Air Pass from Qantas (www.qantas.com) such an important tool for the cost-conscious traveler. Starting at $1,099, it is one of the best deals in trans-Pacific travel.
The pass brings you round-trip airfare into Sydney from Los Angeles (16 other major U.S. gateways are available for add-on fees of $50 to $360), as well as any three additional flight segments within Australia. Because the trans-Pacific round-trip airfare alone costs around $954 if purchased separately, the true cost of the "air pass" portion is less than $150 — that's just $50 per segment.
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Those three flights allow you to add any two other cities in southeast Australia to your itinerary, from Brisbane to the north to Tasmania in the south. My suggestions: Melbourne and Adelaide.
Melbourne has a vibrant arts and cultural scene, top shopping and a gold museum that harkens back to the city's boomtown origins. It's the cultural melting pot of Australia, a city where one-third of the population is either immigrant or first-generation, making for some great ethnic dining possibilities.
Adelaide is a calmer, more genteel colonial city at the heart of the Australian wine country, with some 50 wineries at its doorstep in the Barossa, Eden and Clare valleys. It also offers easy access to Kangaroo Island, one of the richest wildlife preserves in Australia.
If you wish to travel beyond the cities of southeast Australia covered by this least expensive, "Zone 1" version of the pass, you'll have to pay an extra $200 to $300 for a version good for travel throughout "Zone 2" as well (still a good deal, at a real cost of about $117 to $150 per segment).
"Zone 2" extends coverage throughout all of eastern Australia. First up would be Cairns, gateway to that wonder of the natural world, the Great Barrier Reef, 239,000 square miles of coral platforms teeming with nearly 2,000 species of fish and mollusk.
Also in "Zone 2" are Darwin in the tropical Top End — the land of didgeridoos, crocodiles and the massive Kakadu National Park — and Alice Springs, the unofficial capital of the Outback in the deserts of Australia's Red Center. The pass also covers Ayers Rock/ Uluru, that iconic mound of red sandstone rising out of the sandy plains in the geographic center of the continent.
If all that sounds too tempting and you get the feeling you'd need more than three flight segments, you can purchase additional ones starting at $100 each.
The base price of $1,099 for the Aussie Air Pass applies again in May; it is $1,899 through Jan. 31; $1,499, Feb. 1-March 28; and $1,199, March 29-April 30.
