Sydney, Hamilton Island, Cairns - doable in two weeks?

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DH and I have had a bit of a rough time recently (chemical pregnancy after 2nd failed round of IVF) so as a distraction I'm throwing myself into planning a holiday for us during the second two weeks of October.

The idea would be to fly to Sydney for five days, then fly up to Mackay and spend some time on Hamilton Island and the surrounding area, then up to Cairns for five days to do a PADI open water diving certificate on the Great Barrier Reef.

Is this madness? I reckon we can do it (and that it would be awesome) but lots of people I've spoken to about it say it's not worth going all that way for two weeks

Am sorry to read about you recently having a rough time of things

re your proposed holiday it sounds like an awful lot of travelling about in just two weeks and think you need more time, say another week preferably. Have you looked at other potential dive sites?

How would you travel between Mackay and Cairns, by plane its just over 2 hours each way.

Would also consider getting PADI certified here.

It is a lot because there will be jet lag when you arrive but I’d probably do it! (I’m australian though and only decided no more two week trips back there from the U.K. because the 3yos jet lag is worse than ours and means you are up all night when back at work.)

Wow definitely worth it! it will be fabulous!

We'd probably do a road trip between Mackay and Cairns, Atilla - it's an 8-hour drive, so doable in a day I reckon.

I'm really excited about it and pretty much thinking "sod it, let's go!"

Also looked at doing PADI here but it would just be so amazing to do the liveaboard thing - 3 days on the reef!

We did Sydney, Cairns (Trinity Beach), then Surfers Paradise in just a few more days than that (can you stretch to a couple more days to cover the travel time). We used internal flights (nearly did camper van, but glad we didn’t as we ran into a category 5 storm in Cairns).

Factor in jet lag when you get there - we were waking at 4am and falling asleep at 7pm in Sydney!

This was our honeymoon! We did a week in each, give or take flight times. It was fab. I reckon you could have slightly less than a week and still see everything. We stayed on Hamilton island, which was like a real retreat. I would suggest flying into cairns and hiring a car and driving to port douglas - its called the Captain Cook Highway, and is a wonderful journey.

Booked

Flights were HORRIBLY expensive but it's giving us something amazing to look forward to.

We're flying into Sydney and spending 5 days there, then an internal flight up to Mackay, hiring a car and spending 4 days there, driving up to Cairns, and then six days there (three of which are staying on the boat for diving on the reef), then back to the UK from Cairns.

I think we will definitely wish we had more time, but we're only losing 3 days out of 16 to travel so I reckon that's not too bad.

Roll on October!