July 17-August 6, 2025
Earlier this month, we returned from a 20-night trip to Australia via Singapore. As in my previous trip reports, “we” is me, a 40-something professor; my husband, D, a 40-something teacher/pet sitter; and P, our 12-year-old son. It tends to take me a while to finish these trip reports, so I will start with an overview of the trip and some general thoughts. Then, I will add each day of the report as I write it.
Itinerary
Day 0 – drive to New Jersey
Day 1 – Singapore Airlines flight 21 from Newark to Singapore, one of the longest flights in the world
Days 2 -4 – Stopover in Singapore staying at the Pan Pacific Marina Square
Day 5 – flight to Sydney on Scoot
Days 6-9 – Sydney, staying at the Intercontinental
Day 10 – flight to Yulara
Days 11-12 – Uluru & Kata Tjuta
Day 13 – Bus to Alice Springs
Day 14 – Alice Springs and Kangaroo Sanctuary
Day 15 – Board Ghan train to Darwin
Day 16 – travel on Ghan, arriving in Darwin around 8 pm
Days 17-19 – Darwin staying at the Vibe
Day 20 – flight home on Singapore Airlines with a layover in Singapore
Why travel via Singapore?
If you are looking for the most direct way to travel from Boston to Sydney, driving to New Jersey for a flight to Singapore isn’t it. So, why this flight route? The short answer is that we flew flights SQ 21 and 22 in 2022 and enjoyed them. The longer answer is that there’s really no comparison between the level of service on Singapore Airlines and any US-based airline.
In 2024, we had a particularly bad experience flying Delta, the airline that offered the most direct route to Australia. The seats were so uncomfortable that we were not able to sleep at all for the entire overnight flight, the vegetarian meal was literally unseasoned white rice – and just white rice, and the customer service was offered with the apparently-standard attitude of US-based airlines that “you’re lucky we even allowed you lot to buy a ticket for this plane.” In comparison, Singapore Airlines offers comfortable premium economy seats, exceptional customer service, and multiple hot meals that actually taste good. And our premium economy tickets cost less than economy seats on a Delta flight to Sydney.
To illustrate how much Singapore Airlines cares about customer service, in 2022, I completed a survey about my experience on our flight. I rated everything excellent. In the comments section, I asked them to consider offering ice cream to those who order special meals because it was only offered to those with standard meals on our flight. Within a day, I received a phone call apologizing for this deprivation. In contrast, when I suggested that Delta consider serving actual meals to vegetarians, I was told that I should know better than to expect food on a flight and it was on me to buy something in the airport before boarding.
So, why Singapore Airlines? The better question is why did I spend even a minute considering the Delta flight.
Why this itinerary? (Or why didn’t you visit the Great Barrier Reef?)
When putting together this trip, I first considered the weather. We were hoping to avoid both extreme heat and real winter weather (snow, gloom, etc.). Sydney was a must see for me. From there, I added Uluru – a place I had long wanted to see that is best visited in winter. Darwin made the list because it was on the way back to Singapore. From there, the task was to figure out how to string these locations together with minimal flights. That’s how I discovered the Ghan as a travel option. Booking it necessitated traveling to Alice Springs, so our itinerary was set. We skipped the reef – something that shocked many Australians we spoke with – for the simple reason that it would have required 2 additional flights.
Why the fixation on avoiding flights? We really don’t like flying. D and I have always been afraid of flying, and P developed a new fear of flights after all of the bad news about planes over the past year or so. Skipping the Great Barrier Reef meant that two days of our vacation that would have been fairly miserable for us were instead spent happily enjoying Australia.
Overall thoughts on trip and itinerary
We loved Singapore when we visited in 2022, and we loved in just as much the second time. We’ve now spent a total of 8 nights there, and there is still a ton we haven’t gotten to see and do. I don’t think we would stay at the Pan Pacific again because we didn’t love the neighborhood. (After staying on the river at the Fullerton during our first trip, being essentially in a shopping mall was a bit of a letdown.) But we are already looking for another opportunity to return to Singapore.
We also loved Australia. During our trip we enjoyed excellent food, met lots of friendly people, and saw amazing landscapes and wildlife. The itinerary we chose might not be for everyone, but it worked well for us. We prefer to take it slow and see the sights at a leisurely place – even if it means we can’t see everything. So, skipping some of the big-ticket sights like the reef in favor of a route with less internal travel was the right choice for us. Hopefully, we will have an opportunity to visit Australia again and see some of what we missed.
General Tips
- I recommend looking into transportation options before booking hotels, especially if you are going to more remote places. Just because there is a plane, bus, or train between two locations doesn’t mean it runs every day.
- Also check availability for any tours or activities that are must-sees for you before finalizing your itinerary. Two of tours that we did (a day trip to Kangaroo Valley, and the Kangaroo Sanctuary in Alice Springs) don’t run every day. So, we mapped out our itinerary based upon a combination of the transportation schedule and the schedule for these two tours.
- I had multiple fellow-Americans tell me that Australia is really expensive. It’s certainly more expensive than travelling in some parts of the world, but we found that it wasn’t any more expensive than travelling in the US. (Don’t forget to account for the exchange rate and the fact that there is no tipping when looking at prices). That was particularly true for things we booked in advance. When we were in Uluru, for example, the cost for a room at Sails in the Desert popped up on my phone – and it was 2x what we paid for the same room by booking it a year in advance.
- The instructions on the e-Visa app for scanning US passports are incorrect. Look up where to find the chip in your passport before starting the application, and save yourself a headache.
Travel Monkeys 