I boarded a flight from Bali at midnight, destined for the Aussie outback. I had labeled it the death flight. It was a duo of three-hour flights, which left me with only one and a half hours of sleep. Normally this wouldn’t be a big deal but I at 8 am when I arrived it was straight onto a crazy media trip with the Northern Territory Tourism Board.
Over the next seven days, we woke up for sunrise every morning. This wasn’t your casual roll out of bed at 6 am and catch the glowing sky kind of experience. It was on many days, the 3 am or 4 am alarm bell ringing in my ear for another excursion in the dark. We watched the sunrise from hot air balloons, canyons, helicopters, the base of Uluru and on the backs of camels.
Each afternoon tired eyes spread throughout our crew of six but we were on a mission and we were enjoying ourselves way too much to cancel the sunrise the next morning.
Our aim was to create content that helped the tourism board promote Uluru, Alice Springs and the Northern Territory in general. However, our specific aim was to create content that showed these destinations were adventurous and an awesome location for millennials, not just the older generation or ‘grey nomads’ as they are called. The majority of tourists in the area are older and the Northern Territory is looking to add a younger demographic of visitors to the red center!
We planned to do this by jumping out of planes, riding in open door helicopters and hot air balloons, hiking in canyons, visiting oasis-like waterholes in the desert, riding camels through sand dunes and a bunch of other awesome activities.
The tourism board was stoked with the content we created and the buzz around the content we have already shared. This is how social media is being used by tourism boards to target specific demographics such as millennials. Stay tuned for a couple of blog posts I will put out that show the activities that are available in the red center that adventurous types like myself would love. Some of the activities are a bit expensive for a backpacker but many of the experiences were free or quite cheap. It is also a very isolated spot, which hikes up the price a little bit. Therefore I will show you what activities you can expect to do if you are on a shoestring budget and still looking for the adventurous Aussie outback experience.
I wrote a photo blog for each of the days and have linked them below, so you can check out all the photos of what we got up to each day.
OUTBACK AUSTRALIA PHOTO JOURNAL DAY 1: ULURU
OUTBACK AUSTRALIA PHOTO JOURNAL DAY 2: BIKING ULURU
OUTBACK AUSTRALIA PHOTO JOURNAL DAY 3: KINGS CANYON
OUTBACK AUSTRALIA PHOTO JOURNAL DAY 4: OUTBACK WATERHOLES
OUTBACK AUSTRALIA PHOTO JOURNAL DAY 5 & 6: FLYIN’ HIGH
Hope you all had a great week!