Australia Travel Advice

Please read each of the sections below carefully. They provide important information about your field course in Australia. Should you require further assistance please do not hesitate to contact your nearest Operation Wallacea office.

Travelling to and from the expedition

Arrival

The course attendees will meet at 2PM on the Sunday start date at Cairns airport for a 2:30PM departure

Departure

Attendees will be transferred to Cairns airport on the Saturday morning and return flights can be booked from 2PM. Students over 16 years of age can travel independently.

Internal Travel

Participants will be met at Cairns airport and transferred by coach or minibus to the site in Koombooloomba on the first day of their course (approx. 3 hours).

For those then going to our marine site the weekend after, transfers will be arranged in the same way from Koombooloomba to Mission Beach (approx. 3 hours). At the end of their expedition, participants will be transferred from Mission Beach to Cairns airport (approx. 2 hours) with time to catch their flights as stipulated above.

Additional Nights

As part of the internal travel package, it is possible to arrange additional nights in Cairns before and after your field course, and the relevant airport transfers. However, this will be at an additional cost – please contact us for more details.

COVID-19

For all COVID-19 information please visit this page.

Carbon Offsetting

By joining an Operation Wallacea expedition you are contributing directly towards the study and protection of threatened biodiversity, bringing significant financial benefits to small local communities, and working towards protecting valuable carbon stocks from deforestation. We are extremely proud of the impact we and our volunteers have had over the past two decades, creating a significant benefit to the environment.

However, we want to do more. Specifically, we want to make Operation Wallacea completely carbon neutral. As an organisation we offsetting our own emissions from staff travel (both road and air) and from running our offices. But we also want to encourage all our participants to offset, at the very least, the carbon emissions from their own international flights – and ideally more. To do this we will be supporting the Wallacea Reforestation Initiative in partnership with our sister charity the Wallacea Trust (UK Charity 1078362), and you can read more about this exciting project here that takes a new approach to tropical reforestation that benefits not only climate, but biodiversity and livelihoods too.

For more information on Opwall’s Carbon Offsetting click here

How to Calculate Your Donation Amount

Once booked and we’ve received your flight details, you’ll receive an email from us with a recommended donation amount, where we take the exact flight routes you’ve booked on to for your expedition, and run them through the UN’s International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) carbon calculator. This calculator can be found here and the method used is found here. This gives us the total estimated amount of carbon your flights will emit into the atmosphere, and we assign a value of $10 USD (or £7.69 GBP) per ton of carbon. We only used the flights that we’re aware of, so if you have any more you may want to up the donation!

To calculate your carbon footprint you can use one of the many carbon calculators on line such as My Climate, Treedom, International Student Carbon Footprint Challenge and many others. If you’re happy with an estimate, a £15 donation will cover the carbon produced by the flights in more than 95% of cases.