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A note from Tod Hart Owner of Cornerstone Travel Group LLC If you've traveled with Cornerstone, you know me. And if you know me, you know I don't do anything halfway. I've been in the tour business for 36 years. I built my own company, ran it, eventually sold it, and then somehow ended up right back in it, because honestly, it wasn't hard to turn my hand. Travel gets in your blood. So does the community that comes with it. When Cornerstone started, there were seven of us who just loved showing people the world. We loved St. Louis. We loved the idea that travel doesn't have to be stuffy or complicated — it can be joyful, comfortable, and something people actually look forward to. And slowly, that little co-op grew into something I'm really proud of. So when it came time to think about what comes next, I wasn't willing to just let that go.

March 1–21, 2027 | Melbourne, Adelaide, The Ghan, Darwin, Cairns, Sydney, Queenstown, Christchurch Australia and New Zealand are not just destinations on the other side of the world. They are two of the most genuinely remarkable places on earth, remarkable in their geology, their wildlife, their landscapes, and the specific way they make you feel when you are standing in the middle of them. The distance is real. A trip this far from the U.S. requires planning, the right itinerary, and someone who knows what they are doing. But the case for going to the reasons these two countries belong at the top of your travel list is worth laying out in full. Here it is. Eight Reasons Australia and New Zealand Belong at the Top of Your Travel List 1. Visiting the Australian Outback: The Most Ancient Landscape You Will Ever Stand In Most of the landscapes that impress travelers in Europe or North America are geologically young — carved by glaciers ten thousand years ago, shaped by rivers over hundreds of thousands of years. The Australian outback operates on a different timescale entirely. The red rock formations of the Northern Territory. The limestone gorges of the Flinders Ranges. The desert plains stretch in every direction as far as you can see. These landscapes were formed hundreds of millions of years ago, and the Aboriginal cultures that have lived alongside them for at least 65,000 years, the oldest continuous civilization on earth, understood that there was something irreducible about this land that demanded a different kind of relationship with it. Standing in the Australian outback is one of the few experiences in modern travel that produces genuine awe rather than just appreciation. It is not pretty in the way European scenery is. It is vast and old and indifferent in a way that puts human time and human concerns into a perspective that nothing else quite replicates. The way to truly experience it is from a moving window at ground level, watching the landscape change over hours and days, which is why The Ghan exists. 2. The Ghan Train Journey from Adelaide to Darwin: One of the World's Great Rail Experiences The Ghan is a luxury train that has been crossing the Australian interior for nearly a hundred years, traveling 2,979 kilometers from Adelaide in the south to Darwin in the tropical north. The journey takes three days and two nights, passing through the Flinders Ranges, the Red Centre, Alice Springs, and the gorge country of the Northern Territory before arriving in Darwin. The train is 774 meters long, with private ensuite cabins, gourmet dining cars, and panoramic windows designed specifically to put you in relationship with the landscape outside. But what The Ghan gives you that no flight ever could is time. Time to watch the terrain change from the green hills of South Australia into the red desert of the interior, into the tropical lushness of the north. Time to get off at Alice Springs and stand in the actual landscape rather than fly over it. Time to understand, at some bodily level, just how vast this continent is and what it means to be inside it rather than just passing through. Off-train excursions are built into the journey at each stop. In the Flinders Ranges, ancient red gorges and weathered peaks rise around you in a landscape shaped over hundreds of millions of years. At Alice Springs, options include e-biking across ochre trails, exploring Aboriginal cultural sites at Standley Chasm, or taking a helicopter flight over the Red Centre. At Katherine, a cruise through Nitmiluk Gorge, one of the most dramatic river gorges in the Northern Territory, is accessible only by water. There is no equivalent experience in North America. There is no equivalent experience in Europe. The Ghan through the Australian outback is in a category of its own. 3. Great Barrier Reef Snorkeling from Cairns: The Largest Living Structure on Earth The Great Barrier Reef stretches more than 2,300 kilometers along the Queensland coast. It covers an area larger than Italy. It contains 1,500 species of fish, 400 species of coral, 6 species of sea turtle, and more biodiversity than almost any ecosystem on Earth. It is visible from space. UNESCO inscribed it as a World Heritage Site in 1981 and recognized it as one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World. None of those facts will prepare you for what it actually looks like when you slip under the surface. The colors are wrong in the best possible way. Every photograph and documentary you have seen has undersold it. The coral gardens are denser and more intricate and more alive than anything you imagined, and the fish move through them with a confidence that makes you feel like the visitor you are, which is exactly the right way to feel in a place that has existed for half a million years without any help from humans. A full day on a premium catamaran from Cairns to the outer reef gives you time to actually be there rather than simply check it off. The water is warm and clear. A tropical buffet lunch is served on board. The marine life includes reef turtles, parrotfish in flashes of neon color, and the kind of profound underwater quiet that makes ordinary life seem very far away. The Great Barrier Reef should be on your list, not because it is famous but because it is genuinely one of the most remarkable places on earth. And because it is changing. The urgency to see it — to be there, in it, while it is still in the condition it is, is real and not manufactured. 4. Australian Wildlife: Animals Found Nowhere Else on the Planet When Australia separated from the ancient supercontinent Gondwana around 45 million years ago, it took with it a collection of animals that had evolved along entirely different lines from the rest of the world. The result is a country where native wildlife reads like something from another planet. Kangaroos. Koalas. Wombats. The platypus is a mammal that lays eggs, has a duck's bill, and carries venom in its hind legs. Echidnas. The cassowary is a flightless bird that stands six feet tall. Wedge-tailed eagles with wingspans of over two meters. Forty-eight species of kangaroo. None of this is abstract. You encounter it. In the Flinders Ranges, emus appear alongside the train tracks. In the Adelaide Hills, kangaroos emerge at the roadside at dusk. In Cairns, the Daintree, the oldest tropical rainforest on earth, contains species of birds, plants, and insects that exist nowhere else. In the waters around the Great Barrier Reef, sea turtles glide past close enough to touch. The wildlife of Australia is one of the most compelling reasons to go, which almost nobody leads with. People talk about the beaches, the cities, and the iconic landscapes. They underestimate how extraordinary it is to be in a country where the animals themselves are genuinely unlike anything you have seen before. 5. Things to Do in Sydney: One of the World's Great Harbor Cities Sydney needs no introduction and rarely gets a fair one. Most people know the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge and leave it at that. What they miss is how fully and generously a city Sydney, actually is one of the largest and most beautiful natural harbors in the world, surrounded by beaches, national parks, and neighborhoods that each feel like a distinct city in their own right. The Sydney Opera House is one of the twentieth century's most extraordinary works of architecture. Standing at the foot of it, looking back across the harbor at the Bridge, is one of those moments that photographs have made familiar and that reality still manages to make surprising. The walk from Circular Quay through the Rocks Sydney's oldest neighborhood, where the first European settlement took root in 1788, connects the city's contemporary energy to its foundational story in a stretch of a few city blocks. Bondi Beach is fifteen minutes from the city center and one of the most famous stretches of coastline in the world. The Bondi to Coogee coastal walk takes you along sandstone cliffs above the Pacific with views that make it clear why people have been choosing to live in this particular city for over two centuries. The food scene in Sydney is world-class, drawing on one of the most diverse urban populations in the southern hemisphere and a relationship with fresh seafood that is incomparable. Sydney is not a stopover on the way to somewhere else. It is one of the reasons to go. 6. New Zealand's South Island: What Happens When You Build a Country Inside a National Park New Zealand is roughly the size of Colorado. It has a population of about five million people. It contains three World Heritage sites, nine national parks on the South Island alone, and more landscape variety per square kilometer than almost any country on earth. The South Island is where the drama concentrates. The Southern Alps run the length of the island like a spine, topped with permanent glaciers and dropping on the west side into ancient rainforest and on the east side into the vast Canterbury Plains. The fiords of Milford Sound were carved by glaciers. The braided rivers of the Canterbury region are vast and pale and unlike any river system in North America. Queenstown sits in the middle of all of this, on the shores of Lake Wakatipu, beneath a mountain range called The Remarkables which is exactly what they are. The town has built its entire identity around the landscape that surrounds it. The result is a place where adventure activities are genuinely world-class, the food and wine draws on one of New Zealand's finest wine regions, Otago, known for its Pinot Noir, and the views from almost every window are the kind that make people reconsider their living situations. New Zealand rewards the traveler who goes not just because it is beautifu,l though it is, but because it is genuinely wild in a way that is increasingly rare. Large sections of the South Island are so remote and so sparsely populated that you can stand in the middle of them and feel like one of very few humans who have been in that exact spot. That feeling is harder to find in the world than it used to be. 7. The TranzAlpine Train: One of the World's Most Scenic Rail Journeys The TranzAlpine crosses New Zealand's South Island from Christchurch on the east coast to Greymouth on the west, bisecting the Southern Alps in a journey of five hours and 223 kilometers. It passes through 16 tunnels and over four viaducts, the most dramatic of which is the Staircase Viaduct, which towers 73 meters above a river gorge below. The scenery changes completely every thirty minutes. The Canterbury Plains open into alpine gorges. The gorge climbs into Arthur's Pass National Park at the top of the island. The mountains descend into ancient beech rainforest on the wild West Coast. It has been ranked among the world's great scenic rail journeys for decades, and the claim is not hard to believe from the window. Unlike a highlights tour that moves quickly between famous sites, the TranzAlpine gives you the landscape at a pace that lets it register properly. By the time you arrive in Greymouth, you have crossed a country. You understand New Zealand's South Island in a physical way that no drive or flight could replicate. 8. Melbourne and Adelaide: Two Australian Cities That Reward Curiosity Most first-time visitors to Australia are surprised by Melbourne. They expect something outdoorsy and sun-drenched. What they find is a dense, layered, deeply European-feeling city with a genuine claim to being the food capital of the southern hemisphere. Melbourne is consistently ranked among the world's most livable cities. Its coffee culture is so serious that Melbourne-trained baristas have shaped specialty markets in London, New York, and Tokyo. Its food draws on generations of immigrants from every corner of the world, and it takes that food seriously in a way that any major American food city would recognize immediately. The Yarra Valley, thirty minutes from Melbourne, is one of Australia's most celebrated wine and food regions. Domaine Chandon's Australian estate produces sparkling wines that compete with their French originals. The Yarra Valley Chocolaterie uses single-origin cacao and traditional European technique in a setting that looks nothing like the Australia most people picture. Adelaide is South Australia's capital and one of Australia's most underappreciated cities, elegant, compact, surrounded by world-class wine regions, and the gateway to one of the country's most unexpected historical curiosities. Hahndorf, thirty minutes away in the Adelaide Hills, is Australia's oldest surviving German settlement. Founded in 1839 by Lutheran refugees from Prussia, it has remained remarkably intact for nearly two centuries — a nineteenth-century German village in the Australian bush, with artisan bakeries producing bread from century-old recipes. It is a reminder that Australia's history is specific, strange, and full of human stories that most visitors never hear. Day by Day: Your 21-Day Australia and New Zealand Itinerary Day 1–2, March 1–2: Overnight and long-haul flight from Omaha to Melbourne. Day 3, March 3: Arrive in Melbourne, check into the Crown Promenade. Afternoon at the Royal Botanic Gardens. Welcome dinner. Day 4, March 4: Guided city tour of Melbourne Federation Square, historic laneways, Victorian arcades. Afternoon in the Yarra Valley at Domaine Chandon and the Yarra Valley Chocolaterie. Day 5, March 5: Fly to Adelaide. Check into the Hotel. Afternoon in Hahndorf Australia's oldest German settlement, with artisan shops, traditional bakeries, and galleries. Day 6, March 6: Morning in Adelaide. Board The Ghan in the afternoon. Settle into Gold cabin and enjoy gourmet dining as the landscape begins to change. Evening wine tasting stops in the Long Plains region. Day 7, March 7: Off-train day in the Flinders Ranges — ancient red gorges, sweeping lookouts, and native wildlife encounters in some of Australia's most dramatic landscapes. Rejoin the train for dinner. Day 8, March 8: Wake at Marla. Full day off-train in Alice Springs with options including e-biking across ochre trails, Aboriginal cultural sites at Standley Chasm, visits to Simpsons Gap and the Desert Park, and optional helicopter flights over the Red Centre. Day 9, March 9: Final day aboard The Ghan. Off-train excursion options at Katherine including a cruise through the ancient walls of Nitmiluk Gorge. Arrive Darwin in the evening. Check into the Hilton Darwin. Day 10, March 10: Fly Darwin to Cairns. Check into the Shangri-La Cairns. Day 11, March 11: Full-day Great Barrier Reef catamaran cruise from Cairns to the outer reef. Snorkeling, swimming, and marine life encounters. Tropical buffet lunch on board. Day 12, March 12: Additional time in the Cairns region the Daintree Rainforest, Kuranda Scenic Railway, or time to explore the city's waterfront and esplanade. Days 13–15, March 13–15: Fly to Sydney. Three nights at QT Sydney. Guided city touring including the Opera House, Sydney Harbour, the Rocks, and Bondi Beach. Days 16–18, March 16–18: Fly to Queenstown, New Zealand. Three nights at St. Moritz Queenstown. Lake Wakatipu, The Remarkables, Gibbston Valley wine country, adventure activities, and the remarkable restaurant scene of a town that lives for its landscape. Days 19–21, March 19–21: Travel to Christchurch. Check into the hotel. TranzAlpine train journey through the Southern Alps from Christchurch to Greymouth and back. Time to explore Christchurch — including its Botanic Gardens, art precinct, and one of the most fascinating urban rebuilding stories in the world following the 2011 earthquake. Frequently Asked Questions About Visiting Australia and New Zealand Why should I visit Australia and New Zealand rather than Europe, which is closer and more familiar? Europe is extraordinary. But for most American travelers, the landscapes, the culture, and the history are increasingly familiar, with most of us having some frame of reference for them. Australia and New Zealand offer something Europe cannot: genuine otherness. A continent that evolved separately from the rest of the world for 45 million years, producing wildlife and landscapes that do not exist anywhere else. A culture that is English-speaking and welcoming, but built on a completely different set of stories and relationships with the land. The distance is real. So is the difference. People who have been to both consistently say Australia changed something in how they see the world in a way that another European trip could not. Is Australia actually as dangerous as its reputation suggests? Australia's reputation for dangerous wildlife significantly overstates the practical risk to tourists. The country has venomous snakes, large crocodiles in the tropical north, and some formidable spiders, and in practice, fatal encounters with wildlife are extremely rare. Australia records only a handful of snakebite deaths per year in a country of 26 million people, and crocodile attacks occur almost exclusively in clearly signed areas well-known to locals and guides. The cities are exceptionally safe, the tourist infrastructure is world-class, and the practical experience of traveling in Australia is not meaningfully different from any other developed English-speaking country. Why is New Zealand worth combining with Australia on the same trip? New Zealand and Australia share a region but almost nothing else: different geology, different landscapes, different Indigenous cultures, different character entirely. The South Island of New Zealand contains a landscape variety simply unavailable in Australia: active glaciers, ancient fiords, towering alpine peaks, braided glacier rivers, and some of the most dramatic coastal scenery in the southern hemisphere. Combining both countries in a single trip lets you experience the ancient vastness of Australia and the compressed, dramatic wildness of New Zealand as one journey through two completely different lenses on what the far side of the world actually looks and feels like. What makes The Ghan train journey worth three days? Flying the same route The Ghan travels takes three hours. You see nothing meaningful from the air. The Ghan takes three days, with stops that put you directly into the landscape — the ancient gorge country of the Flinders Ranges, the Red Centre at Alice Springs, the tropical gorges of Katherine. At ground level, crossing a continent over three days, you develop a physical understanding of Australia's scale and age that no other form of travel provides. It is widely regarded as one of the world's great rail journeys not primarily because of the train itself, though it is genuinely luxurious but because of what it lets you understand about the country it crosses. What is the best time of year to visit Australia and New Zealand? March falls in late summer for both countries, making it one of the most favorable windows for a combined trip. In Australia, the summer heat is softening, the tropical regions are transitioning out of the wet season, Great Barrier Reef water temperatures and visibility are excellent, and tourist crowds have thinned from their December peak. In New Zealand, March is late summer long days, warm temperatures, and the South Island's mountains and lakes at their most accessible and photogenic. December and January are also popular but busier and hotter across much of Australia. What is included in the Australia and New Zealand 2027 tour? This tour includes round-trip economy-class airfare from Omaha with one checked bag, all internal airfare throughout the trip, airport transfers, 32 meals, hotel accommodations at premium properties in both countries, hotel transfers, and step-on and group guide services. Gratuities, travel insurance, cancellation waivers, visas, and travel documents are not included. Upgraded cabin options on The Ghan are available at additional cost. Group size is 1 to 20 travelers. For full details and the brochure, contact Excite Experiences at 402-293-9282 or visit excitemytravel.com. The World Is Larger Than Most of Us Have Seen Australia and New Zealand are genuinely different from anywhere else you have been. Different in their geology, their wildlife, their cultures, and their landscapes. The Great Barrier Reef is the largest living structure on earth and you can swim through it. The Australian outback is one of the oldest landscapes on the planet and you can cross it on a luxury train over three days. Sydney harbor is one of the most beautiful urban settings in the world. New Zealand's South Island contains some of the most dramatic and compressed natural scenery anywhere, and its people are among the warmest you will ever encounter. These are not incremental experiences. They are the kind of trips that change the frame through which people see everything else. Excite has built a 21-day itinerary that handles every piece of the logistics — airfare from Omaha, premium hotels throughout, 32 meals included, all internal travel arranged. The trip is March 1–21, 2027. Itinerary details and accommodations are subject to change. Please refer to the tour page for the most current information. Download the brochure or call 402-293-9282. Visit excitemytravel.com for more information.