The Big Trip in numbers – A nagy utazás számokban

Written by my husband, Steve:

I’ve always been fascinated with numbers and statistics. Our recently completed 78-day trip proved a wonderful source of new and interesting numbers I’d like to share with you. But where to begin? There are so many fun numbers to introduce and discuss.

Let’s begin with the basics, shall we? Five countries over the aforementioned 78 days: Australia, Papua New Guinea, Singapore (okay, just an overnight in a hotel attached to the airport), Indonesia, and New Zealand. Where did we lay our heads each night? Forty accommodations and 43 beds! The numbers don’t match because two of the beds were on the transoceanic flights at the beginning and end of the trip, plus one instance of staying in the same hotel a couple of days apart and being placed in different rooms.

All told, we had 21 flights totaling approximately 31,500 miles (50,720 kilometers). These ranged from 15-hour international flights to a breathtaking scenic flight in Tasmania in a 4-passenger plane. And in Papua New Guinea two of our destinations were so remote that both the 8-passenger plane (we were the only passengers) and the pilot stayed with us throughout the length of our visits!

Needless to say, we couldn’t pull off such a monumental adventure by plane alone. Therefore, an attempt was made at quantifying all the various modes of transportation employed. It resulted in the following impressive list:

4 Trains
10 Boats
11 Buses
1 Car with driver and guide
3 Cars driven by friends
2 Rental cars
2 Trams
4 Feet

As with the planes, there was also much variation amongst these modes. For example, one train crossed Australia from Sydney to Perth, a second one traversed from Adelaide to Alice Springs, while the two remaining ones were commuter trains in Sydney.

Boats ranged from sailing for two days in the Sape Straits between Flores and Komodo Islands, taking the ferry from Wellington on the North Island of New Zealand to Picton on the South Island, and motoring up and down the Karawari River in Papua New Guinea, to a 2-minute trip across a small lake to access a thermal area in New Zealand.

Buses ranged from 12 to 15-passenger vans to full size 60-passenger luxury types. These big ones were used for larger tours, mostly Western Australia and in the Outback, but also in Hobbiton, New Zealand, while the smaller ones were more frequently associated with city tours, or village tours in the highlands of Papua New Guinea.

We were also lucky have a car with driver and guide to show us around Bali, to have friends drive us around less visited regions of Australia and New Zealand, and to have made the great decision to rent cars for two extended portions of our trip: Tasmania and throughout both islands of New Zealand. The two trams noted above were utilized in Melbourne as there is a free tram zone in the downtown area of that amazing city.

Which leaves us with our four feet! We made good use of these in all sorts of situations. Walking around a city center, tracking Komodo dragons through the heat and dust on Komodo Island, hiking into Wineglass Bay on Tasmania, visiting remote villages in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, walking the Walpa Gorge in Kata Tjuta and Kings Canyon in the Outback, or birding with friends in the Bunya Mountains in Queensland. We felt walked out at the end of many days, but we never regretted for a second the sites we saw and the experiences we accumulated.