Australia
Australia grew a plant-based food culture without asking anyone’s permission. Sydney and Melbourne have more vegan kitchens per capita than almost anywhere, and Queensland adds rainforest, reef, and wildlife you won’t see anywhere else on earth.
- Best months
- Oct – Mar
- Trip length
- 12 – 16 days
- From
- $9,800 pp
- Fly into
- Sydney · Brisbane · Cairns
Australian cafés set the standard the rest of the world copied: oat flat whites, smashed avocado, grain bowls that were never a compromise. The cities are the easy part. The reason to fly this far is the country itself — a koala asleep in a eucalypt, a cassowary crossing the track, a rainforest older than the Amazon.
We build the trip in three movements: a harborside hotel in Sydney, a rainforest lodge in the far north where the Daintree meets the reef, and a hinterland retreat above the Gold Coast where the day ends looking over the Scenic Rim. Every hotel has your dietary needs before you land, and every wildlife experience we book is one we’ve checked for how the animals are kept.
A route we like
014 nightsSydney
A hotel on the harbor, the ferry past the Opera House, Victoria Park and the Surry Hills café strip, dinner at one of the city’s plant-based tasting rooms.
025 nightsCairns & the Daintree
Fly north to the tropics. A rainforest lodge, a Kuku Yalanji cultural walk, the reef by boat, and a fruit bowl at breakfast you’ve never seen before.
034 nightsGold Coast hinterland
A retreat on Tamborine Mountain above the Scenic Rim, rainforest boardwalks at first light, glow worms after dark, and the wild Pacific coast an hour below.
- Oat flat white & avo toast
- Tropical fruit breakfasts
- Lemon myrtle & wattleseed
- Bush tomato & saltbush
- Plant-based tasting menus
- Lamingtons, veganized
The long flight
Twenty hours from the US East Coast. We plan around the routing that lands in the morning, and hold the first two nights somewhere you can do nothing.
Wildlife done properly
Australia has good sanctuaries and bad ones. We only book conservation-run parks and guided walks where the animals are wild or genuinely rescued, and we skip anything with holding or feeding.
Seasons run backwards
October to March is summer in Sydney and the wet season in the far north. We time the tropics for the dry shoulder and the cities for the warmth.
