If I decide to visit my cousins in NZ again I would visit Tasmania at the same time. Only ever heard good things spoken about Taz.
That's also true to a certain extent in a lot of small town outback pubs.... He's a big Jessie. We travelled in a beat up Ford Falcon station wagon with no aircon and slept in a tent. Hottest temperatures we experienced was 47 degrees but that was a one-off. It was a weird day, cloudy and windy. At night the mozzies came out in clouds so dense I couldn't read the book I had because they covered the page. There was total fire ban in place and I couldn't smoke or boil water for tea. Mrs Gimlet couldn't share the driving that day. She spent the whole time half comatose on the passenger seat with a wet towel round her head. But there was a swimming pool at the campsite which was bloody freezing and many beers in the eskie so everything worked out fine. We did research the climate though. We started from Sydney at the end of January and headed south going round the bottom end and up the middle clockwise. If you do that and spend a year getting back to Sydney again you can more or less stay in perpetual summer. Not so good the other way round. If anything cold nights were more a discomfort than hot days. We got to Alice Springs around the end of April and there was frost on the windscreen in the morning. The suns still burned your skin but a cold wind chapped your ears at the same time and you needed a jumper on most of the day. We drove from Alice to Katherine in NT in one day. We scraped the windscreen in the morning and stepped out of the car in the evening to 28 degrees and palm trees.
Billions of snakes in Tazzie. Properly crawling with them. Far more than the mainland. If you've got a car the ferry across the Bass Strait is hideously expensive too. Beautiful place though and more temperate than most of the country.
Really, I pegged you higher The Mrs is an Aussie and we’ve toured the country extensively over the past 20 years. It’s such a diverse country with so much to see. For an outback tour, maybe: Ayers Rock -> Alice Springs -> Coober Peedy -> Adilade -> Melbourne (along the Great Ocran Road). Or, for lifestyle tour; Sydney -> Byron Bay -> Surfers Paradise -> Cairns -> Port Douglas -> Great Barrier Reef. Also worth considering staying in back packers hostels. Most do couples rooms and you will meet way more people (if that’s your thing).
