Things to Do in Australia in March

West of Sydney, the Blue Mountains rise in sheer sandstone escarpments that drop into valleys so deep the eucalyptus oil haze tints them genuine blue-grey. This full-day outing wraps together Scenic World's engineered thrills, where you descend into the Jamison Valley on the steepest incline railway in the world, metal track clattering beneath you as rainforest canopy closes overhead, with a wildlife encounter putting you within arm's reach of koalas for a photograph. The railway emerges into ancient temperate rainforest floored with ferns unfurling at knee height. Air noticeably cooler and damp, thick with wet soil and decaying bark. Above, the Skyway gondola crosses the valley with glass floor forcing you to confront the sheer scale of the drop, the Three Sisters rock formation looming at eye level, their weathered orange faces catching late-morning light.

Paddling across Sydney Harbour in a kayak strips away every abstraction you have about this city. Replaces it with salt spray on your forearms, the slap of small harbour chop against your hull, the enormous steel curve of the Harbour Bridge growing larger with every stroke. This guided paddle takes you to Goat Island, a small sandstone outcrop with convict-era ruins most Sydney visitors never see because no public ferry stops there. Your guide, a local who knows the harbour's tidal patterns and shipping lanes, threads the group past moored yachts in Balmain and around the island's craggy shoreline, where you peer into the old magazine store and harbour master's cottage, their sandstone walls stained amber and green with age and salt. The water here is surprisingly clear in the shallows. In March the surface temperature remains warm enough that capsizing, while unlikely in a stable touring kayak, is a mild inconvenience rather than a shock.

This itinerary layers the Blue Mountains' geological drama with return journey by ferry along the Parramatta River, a combination giving you two entirely different scales of Australian landscape in one day. The Blue Mountains section follows the same sandstone escarpments and rainforest valleys described above, with Scenic World's cable car, railway, and walkway providing access points. What distinguishes this outing is inclusion of a river ferry carrying you back toward Sydney through inner harbour suburbs, the smell of diesel and salt water mixing as the boat passes under the Iron Cove Bridge and cityscape slowly reassembles on the horizon. You watch bush give way to brick terraces, then glass towers. The transition compresses a hundred kilometres of geography into an hour of gentle cruising. The wildlife park component introduces kangaroos in open enclosures where you crouch at their level, close enough to see the coarse texture of their grey-brown fur and the surprisingly delicate way they use forepaws to pick up food.

At dusk, the canopy erupts. Grey-headed flying foxes, Australia's largest bat species with wingspans approaching a full metre, peel off their daytime roost by the thousand, their dark silhouettes streaming against the dimming sky like scraps of black fabric caught in wind. This guided experience positions you beneath one of Australia's major urban flying fox colonies, where a specialist interpreter explains the ecology of these animals while you stand close enough to hear the leathery flap of their wings, the high-pitched chatter as they jostle for launch position, and the peculiar sweet-musky smell of the colony lingering in warm evening air. The grey-headed flying fox is a threatened species in Australia. This is not a zoo encounter but a visit to a wild roost where animals behave entirely on their own terms. Through provided optics, you can make out individual faces, their large amber eyes and fox-like snouts giving the species its name, and the way mothers carry pups clinging to their bellies during the evening exodus.

South of Adelaide, McLaren Vale spreads across a gently undulating plain where warm maritime air from Gulf St Vincent meets ancient alluvial soils, a combination producing Shiraz and Grenache of extraordinary concentration and depth. A private tour here means your driver adjusts the itinerary to your palate rather than a bus schedule, stopping at cellar doors where you taste directly from barrel in dim, cool-stone tasting rooms smelling of French oak and fermenting grape must. In March, McLaren Vale is in the thick of vintage: you will see picking crews in the rows at dawn, taste juice that was fruit on the vine that morning, and hear the low mechanical hum of crushers and presses operating behind the cellar door. The alternative route into the Adelaide Hills climbs to cooler elevations where varietals shift to Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Noir, vineyards located between grey-green eucalyptus stands, the air carrying the sharper, greener scent of cool-climate fermentation. Australia's wine regions are among the most accessible in the world for visitors, and these two sit within an hour of Adelaide's city centre, making a day of serious tasting entirely practical without an overnight stay.

A private vehicle changes the equation in the Blue Mountains entirely. Instead of following the fixed route of a group coach, you can ask your guide to take the back roads through the upper mountains where eucalyptus forest thickens and the smell of the bush, that resinous, slightly sweet vapour intensifying in warm air, fills the car the moment you drop the window. The wildlife component here is built into the day rather than bolted on: you visit a sanctuary where kangaroos graze in open paddocks and you walk among them, feeling the brush of coarse fur if one ambles past your leg, and where koalas sit wedged into the forks of eucalyptus branches close enough to hear the slow, rasping sound of their breathing as they doze. The private format means the guide can time arrivals at major lookouts, Echo Point and Govetts Leap among them, to avoid the cluster of tour buses that stack up between ten and noon. From Govetts Leap, the escarpment drops three hundred metres into the Grose Valley, and on a clear March morning the view extends to a horizon line of blue-hazed ridges that seems to recede indefinitely, the silence broken only by the whistle of currawongs circling below the rim.