Quote:
Originally Posted by Hemi-Cuda
i never heard of Contiki before, but i think i may have to end up doing one of these trips. i've always wanted to do more traveling abroad but never had anyone to go with, and i'm not much of the solo backpacking type. these tours sound like exactly what i'm looking for
|
That pretty much sounds like me.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kipper3256
Couple of questions for you:
1. How long did you go for on each of the trips?
2. Is their any way to tell which of the trips will have more younger people / more partying?
|
The way their tours are structured in Europe and the rest of the world are different. In Europe, there's enough demand that each tour group is the same from beginning to end. In the other parts of the world, they basically have a general loop and the tours are packaged to join and leave that loop depending on what you want.
In Australia, they have one bus leave Sydney traveling north to Cairns, which takes about two weeks. Then, it turns around and goes back to Sydney. Then, they have another bus in the Outback, going from Alice Springs to Uluru, then all the way up to Darwin, which is about a week and a half.
I did the full tour from Sydney to Cairns, then flew to Alice Springs and did the tour down to Uluru and up to Darwin. I believe it was 24 nights in total.
However, there were a lot of people who just did the east coast trip and a lot who just did the Outback, plus there were a bunch of smaller trips that did things like Sydney to Surfer's Paradise or Whitsundays to Cairns. No matter which trip you do there, everyone is on the same bus.
In Europe, you do the full trip with the same group of people. The one I did was 10 cities in 19 nights, starting with one night in London (you can book additional nights before your tour), then 2 nights in every other city, which was good because you were only on the bus every other day.
Their whole thing is that they're tours for ages 18-35, so, your group is always pretty young. All the ones I did were mostly people in the 25-30 range, with a few on either side of that. They're all structured with a lot of nightlife, so the party aspect is something you would have to go out of your way to avoid.