Things to Do in Australia in January

West of Sydney, where the Great Dividing Range drops into sandstone gorges a thousand metres deep, this full-day journey threads together the Blue Mountains' most dramatic vantage points with close encounters at a wildlife park. You descend into the Jamison Valley aboard Scenic World's railway, the steepest in the Southern Hemisphere, the carriage tilting at a fifty-two-degree angle as cool air rushes upward carrying the sharp, medicinal scent of eucalyptus and damp fern. At the wildlife park, you hold a koala whose coarse, woolly fur feels nothing like the plush toy version, and whose claws grip your forearm with surprising authority while a photographer captures the moment.

Paddling out from a put-in point on Sydney Harbour, you glide across water that in January feels bathwater-warm against your knuckles each time you dip your hand over the gunwale. The route passes beneath the steel lattice of the Harbour Bridge, close enough to hear the hum of traffic reverberating through the ironwork, before reaching Goat Island, a former convict quarantine station and gunpowder magazine that most Sydneysiders have never set foot on. Your local guide narrates layers of colonial history as sandstone fortifications rise from the waterline, their surfaces pocked and golden, while ferries churn white wakes in the middle distance and the Opera House catches the light like a set of opening shells on the far shore.

This variant of the Blue Mountains day trip adds a Parramatta River ferry leg, which transforms the return journey from a highway commute into a slow glide past mangrove-fringed banks, harbourside mansions with their feet in the water, and finally the towers of Circular Quay emerging against the evening sky. In the mountains themselves, you ride all four Scenic World experiences, including the Skyway gondola suspended over the Jamison Valley where the forest canopy stretches unbroken to the horizon, a dense, silvery-green carpet that shimmers in the heat. The wildlife component puts you face to face with kangaroos in an open enclosure where they graze freely and will eat pellets from your palm, their whiskers tickling your fingers.

At dusk in a parkland colony along an Australian river corridor, grey-headed flying foxes begin to stir, and what starts as a few dark shapes detaching from the canopy quickly becomes a torrent of wings. These animals have a wingspan approaching a metre, and watching thousands launch simultaneously is a sensory event that bypasses the intellect entirely: the sound is a leathery rustling overlaid with high-pitched chittering, the smell is sharp and musky, and the sky above you fills with silhouettes streaming toward the horizon in long, undulating ribbons. A specialist guide interprets their behaviour in real time, explaining roost dynamics, navigation, and the ecological role these animals play as long-distance pollinators of native hardwoods.

South Australia's two premier wine regions sit within an hour of Adelaide but could not be more different in character. McLaren Vale hugs the coast, its vineyards planted on ancient soils that crumble like terracotta between your fingers, producing shiraz and grenache with a savoury, earth-driven intensity. The Adelaide Hills climb into the Mount Lofty Ranges, where the air is noticeably cooler even in January, carrying the scent of pine and wild herbs, and the wines lean toward crisp sauvignon blanc and elegant pinot noir. A private tour means the itinerary bends to your palate: a morning at a cellar door where the winemaker pours directly from barrel, lunch at a farmhouse restaurant where the bread arrives warm and the olive oil is pressed from trees visible through the window, an afternoon tasting at a boutique producer whose entire annual output would fill a single shipping container.

A private vehicle and guide transforms the Blue Mountains from a group-tour checkbox into an unhurried immersion. Without the fixed schedule of a bus tour, you can linger at Echo Point when the Three Sisters catch early light and the valley below is still pooled with mist, or detour to a lesser-visited lookout where the only sound is the crack of a whipbird echoing off sandstone walls. The wildlife component takes place at a sanctuary where kangaroos roam freely across open grassland, approaching close enough that you can feel the surprising density of their fur and hear the rhythmic thump of their hind feet on packed earth. Koala encounters are similarly intimate, conducted under the supervision of keepers who explain each animal's personality and dietary preferences while the koalas sit wedged in eucalyptus forks, chewing with the slow, deliberate jaw rotation of a creature with nowhere to be.