Our adventure began on 8 June 2024; waving goodbye to our home base of Wangaratta (Victoria) with a determination to leave Australia without flying.
As Wangaratta is in the South East of Australia, we first had a few thousand kilometres to cover by land. We aimed for Airlie Beach (Queensland), where we were meeting our Skipper, Steve, owner of an 11m Dufour Classic sail boat. Steve had accepted to take us on as crew to sail up the East coast of Australia and across to Indonesia.
We travelled 2,660 km from Wangaratta to Airlie Beach via Sydney and Brisbane, preferring 23 hours in two trains and 19 hours in one bus to a few hours in airports and in the air. Then, we sailed up the long coast of Queensland and across the Arafura Sea to Indonesia.
This blog post gives information on train and bus travel in Australia, and, most importantly, it also gives tips on how to find a sailing ride and our reflections on this.
Trains – sit back, relax and enjoy the view
We started our journey with the XPT CountryLink train from Benalla train station (In North East Victoria), via Wangaratta, and on through the night to Sydney Central Station. Travelling by train in Australia is a great way to enjoy the gradual changes in the pastel coloured landscapes, to appreciate the sheer size of the country-continent, and maybe even spot a few kangaroos along the way. Can’t do that in a plane, can you?
Australia, as wonderful as it is, favours two primary modes of transport: planes and utes (big pick up cars). As a result, investment in trains has been lagging; the network is limited, restricted mostly to the East coast states, and Australian trains are rather slow. It is therefore often faster to drive, but trains have the advantage of being more relaxing, most of the time…
Trains are comfortable and clean, some have power plugs but there is generally no wifi on board. There is a bar and meal service in CountryLink XPT trains which serves decent meals with vegetarian options. As always in Australia, service is excellent and attendants are delightful. Most regional and intercity trains run on diesel, but per capita it is still less emissions-intensive than driving or flying.
In economy class, prices are generally cheaper than flying and they are fixed, so unlike in Europe (France at least) prices are not demand-driven, skyrocketing just when you need to book a ticket. For an overnight journey, sleepers are an option and quite comfortable, albeit loud due to old rolling stock and tracks. Sleepers on the XPT accommodate two people per cabin and include a light breakfast. Prices for sleepers are dear though: expect around AUD200 per person for Melbourne to Sydney. We chose the reclining seats which were half the price, but of course we didn’t sleep very well at all. We tend to always pack sleeping pills now for overnight journeys and we sure used them!
Train networks in Australia are State-run so you need to head to each specific website to book tickets.
These are the websites we used:
- Trains in Victoria: https://www.vline.com.au/ (for the moment you still need to pick up a paper ticket at the station)
- Trains in NSW including the XPT lines from Melbourne to Sydney and Sydney to Brisbane: https://transportnsw.info/regional-bookings
- Trains in Queensland: http://www.queenslandrail.com.au/
Beware! Trains tend to book out during holiday season so make sure to book ahead of time or you will need to take the bus!
Buses – cheap but definitely not our preferred choice
We took the Premier Motor Service Bus from Brisbane to Airlie Beach. This specific company was significantly cheaper than other bus companies such as Greyhound. However, with the train only a few dollars more, we ended up on the bus only because the trains were booked out during the school holidays.
The driver had the pedal on the floor almost all the trip up the south Queensland coast, and with a waft of alcohol and body odour in the bus it was not the most pleasant or comfortable experience. Buses do the job, but pick the train a thousand times over if you can.
We booked our tickets here: https://premierms.com.au/
Leaving Australia without flying – in for a challenge
On the map, and compared to the size of Australia and of other bodies of water around the globe, the Arafura Sea, which lies between Australia and Indonesia, looks small enough that two total sailing novices like us thought it a challenge within our reach. And so that’s how we initially settled on a flightless adventure from Australia. We felt that leaving this giant island by sea, a continent which one pretty much always enters by plane unless a seaperson, was a pretty awesome prospect.
After a lot of research and a few phone calls we confirmed that there are currently no commercial options for a passenger to leave Australia without flying. Unfortunately, in the post-covid world, cargo ships no longer take passengers, at least in this part of the world. There may be some options on cruise ships, involving many thousands of dollars, but we didn’t dwell on these options for very long. That left us with the one and only option to hitch a ride on a sailboat.
Tips to find a ride on a sailboat:
- Acquire a little experience if you can: we had no previous experience and would definitely recommend that you acquire some if you can, always useful and will make for a more enjoyable ride.
- Make a “sailor CV” to post on facebook: Even though we had no sailing experience to record, we made a nice CV explaining our project, who we are, how we can be useful, etc. It was highly appreciated by the skippers with whom we got in contact.
- Join, search and post on facebook groups: there are plenty, including Sailing Australia to Indonesia, Australia Crew Finder, Sailing Australia, World Crew Finder, etc. and for every part of the world. We also joined for free the Crew Bay website. We spent time looking for people posting about the crossing to Indonesia, looking for crew, etc.
- Direct message skippers: at the end of the day, what successfully got us a ride was private messaging skippers that we had identified as sailing this route and expressing interest in finding additional crew.
- Establish contact and question skippers: it is important to know about their plans, route, experience, condition of the boat, etc. It’s certainly preferable, and highly recommended, to find someone who has experience with multi day ocean/sea crossings and long term sailing. Make sure you are on the same page and feel as comfortable as you can with the prospect of living in cramped conditions for days and weeks with this person.
- Be flexible: sailing doesn’t run on a fixed schedule. It depends on the elements. You have to be flexible with departure and arrival times and even locations.
If you are specifically sailing from Australia to Indonesia:
- The best season (ie. not cyclone season) is April – August. This is when you will have the most chances of finding a ride too.
- I suggest contacting the organisers of the Sail2Indonesia rally. They had shared our crew offer and CV with the rally members.
- If you haven’t found a ride in advance, as a last resort you can try rocking up at the Thursday Island or Darwin harbours, ideally at the same time as the Sail2Indonesia rally boats. When we sailed, there were around a dozen boats in the rally stationed at Thursday Island for a few days during the week of 8 July to prepare for the crossing. With a bit of luck one of them might be keen to give you a ride and have extra hands on board for the crossing, although I certainly wouldn’t bet on success as most boats would have their crew, and all the required paperwork for leaving Australia and entering Indonesia, sorted by this point. We recommend checking with the organisers to find out roughly when the boats should be there as it may change each year. Also in 2025 there will be the biannual Darwin to Ambon race.
- Indonesia has a new regulation in place since July 2024 requiring boats to have the exact same crew when they leave Indonesia as when they arrived. This is nonsensical but that’s the new way. We discovered this new rule upon arriving at Indonesian immigration, where they refused to sign us off the captain’s crew list (which he will need to leave Indonesia). After three days of repeatedly going to the immigration office in Saumlaki, and the harbourmaster’ office, and with no success, we decided to still part ways as planned. We subsequently sent our Skipper photos of our exit stamps and ferry tickets when we left Indonesia and hopefully when he leaves in a year’s time he will be fine or they will have realised this is ridiculous and adapted the regulation. So beware of a potential bureaucratic hurdle here. It’s really more of a risk for the skipper than the crew.
We eventually set sail with Steve on his Dufour Classic 36 from Airlie Beach. For us it was perhaps a once in a lifetime experience, as some rough weather towards the end of the trip sobered our enthusiasm for future crossings of this nature. But we made it, we learnt a heap along the way, loved island hopping and snorkelling along the Great Barrier Reef, rounding up Cape York by boat, and experiencing the sheer beauty of the sky, the sun, the moon, the stars and the ocean. Australia truly is a wild and magnificent place, with endless bays, reefs and islands to explore!
For more details on the journey itself and our life aboard see the articles on our Journal page.
