Sydney to Cairns Self Drive Holiday

Twenty-seven nights from Sydney to Cairns, self-guided and tailor-made, combining city stays with campervan travel up the east coast of Australia.

The length is what makes it work. Two thousand miles of Queensland coast rewards time, and a month allows the drive to be broken by hotel nights in the cities and campervan nights in between rather than committing to one or the other.

Sydney opens it, with the Blue Mountains inland, where the sandstone escarpment drops away in sheer walls and the eucalypt haze that gives them their name sits in the valleys. The route then runs north along the coast, through the beaches, the reef towns and the sugar country, to the Daintree, which is estimated at around 180 million years old and is the oldest surviving tropical rainforest on earth, with a stay at the Daintree Ecolodge. Cairns closes it, the gateway to the Great Barrier Reef.

The itinerary is tailor-made and the inclusions are not itemised in detail on the operator’s page, so the accommodation, the vehicle and the activities are all worth settling in writing at booking. The price shown is per person and excludes flights. Twenty-eight days end to end is a serious trip and the cost reflects it. The southern winter from May to September is the better window for the tropical north, since the wet season between December and March brings cyclones and closes roads above Cairns. No wildlife sighting can be promised, on the reef or in the forest. Being tailor-made, the balance between hotels and campervan nights can be shifted either way at the planning stage, which is worth doing deliberately rather than leaving to the standard itinerary.