Australia

'We loved every minute of our drive'

Travel Counsellor Alex Maxwell-Clarke

I won a prize of five nights’ rental at a Tourism Australia event, and we travelled in March this year. I planned the route very carefully as I treated this trip more like a self-fam than a holiday. My partner is also an amateur photographer, so he was especially keen to capture the diverse Australian landscapes and wildlife.

It could have been a scene from the TV show Undercover Boss – Dame Irene Hays, owner and chair of the Hays Travel Group, surprised a Hays Travel fam trip in Sydney, by going incognito at the BridgeClimb Sydney. 

It was Dame Irene’s first visit to Australia in more than 20 years – she attended Australian Tourism Exchange, before linking up with the fam trip group in Sydney.

This Friday, Gary Barlow, the travel presenter, returns to our screens, and this time he’s having a grand time with his celebrity pals in Australia. The six-part series for ITV is billed as a culinary journey, taking viewers right around the country to all six States and Territories, from the Northern Territory to South Australia, and from Queensland to Western Australia. The programme was filmed last November when Gary and his Take That bandmates were on tour in Australia.

An immense and complex landscape of towering red cliffs, dramatic gorges and arid savannah intertwined with mangrove forests, thundering waterfalls, wild rivers and secluded white-sand beaches, it also boasts the world’s largest inshore reef and the only two ‘horizontal’ falls on the planet. It’s also home to the world’s largest living reptile – the saltwater crocodile, the largest population of migrating humpback whales anywhere on Earth, and important seabird and marine turtle breeding colonies.