Things to Do in Australia in May

The Blue Mountains Adventure: Scenic World, Zoo and Koala Photo compresses an entire day of Australia's most dramatic landscapes into a single guided arc. You begin with Scenic World's trio of rides. The Skyway gondola hangs suspended above the Jamison Valley, the Cableway descends into ancient rainforest, and the Railway drops at a fifty-two-degree incline through a tunnel blasted from sandstone, the rumble and screech of the carriage echoing off wet rock walls. The afternoon pivots to a wildlife park where you stand close enough to a koala to smell the eucalyptus oil on its fur and feel the coarse, woolly texture of its back while a keeper positions the animal for a photograph you will keep longer than any landscape shot.

Kayaking to Goat Island in Sydney Harbour with a local guide strips away the postcard gloss and replaces it with salt spray on your lips, the slap of a fibreglass hull against harbour chop, and a perspective of the Opera House and Harbour Bridge that no ferry deck or headland lookout can replicate. You launch from a quiet inlet and paddle past sandstone sea walls stained ochre and black by tidal algae, rounding into channels where container ships loom overhead and the displaced wake rolls your kayak in a gentle, rhythmic swell. Goat Island itself, a harbour islet most Sydneysiders have never set foot on, holds convict-era gunpowder magazines and quarantine buildings, their walls cool and mossy even at midday, and the guide contextualises each ruin with stories grounded in the harbour's colonial and Indigenous maritime history.

The Blue Mountains, Scenic World, Zoo and Ferry Ride tour layers a Parramatta River ferry journey onto the core Blue Mountains experience, and that river transit, often treated as mere transport, turns out to be one of the day's highlights. The ferry carves downstream past mangrove-fringed banks and waterfront suburbs where pelicans roost on jetty pylons, the diesel thrum underfoot and the smell of brine mixing with the eucalyptus-scented air blowing down from the escarpment. At Scenic World you ride all three signature conveyances, and the elevated boardwalk through Jurassic-era temperate rainforest puts you at canopy height, close enough to hear water dripping from tree-fern fronds onto the boardwalk planks. The wildlife park segment introduces kangaroos, wallabies, and wombats in open enclosures where the animals approach you rather than the reverse, their fur surprisingly coarse and warm under your fingertips.

The Flying Fox Experience takes you into a riverside camp where thousands of grey-headed flying foxes, Australia's largest bat species, with wingspans approaching a metre, hang in dense, chittering clusters from the branches of riparian fig trees. The smell hits first: a musky, faintly sweet mammalian odour that mingles with the damp-earth scent of the riverbank. As dusk approaches, the colony stirs, and individual bats stretch their leathery wings with an audible creak of membrane before launching into the darkening sky in a stream that can last twenty minutes, silhouetted against a sky turning from copper to indigo. Your guide uses a red-filtered torch to illuminate roosting animals at close range without disturbing them, and you watch mothers clutching pups to their chests, fur ruffled by the evening breeze coming off the water.

Private Wine Tours through McLaren Vale or the Adelaide Hills put you in the passenger seat of a vehicle threading narrow roads between vineyard rows where shiraz vines are shedding their last amber and crimson leaves in May's cooling air. McLaren Vale sits on an ancient seabed tilted toward the Gulf St Vincent, and the maritime influence means you taste salt-laced minerality in the grenache and a savoury, almost olive-tapenade character in the shiraz that distinguishes this region from anywhere else on the continent. In the Adelaide Hills, the altitude shifts the palate toward cool-climate sauvignon blanc and pinot noir, and cellar doors here tend to be smaller, quieter, often run by the winemaker who pours your tasting and describes the exact parcel of hillside the grapes came from. Your guide tailors the route to your preferences: a cheese-focused lunch at a farmstead dairy, a stop at a micro-distillery producing gin from native botanicals, or a vertical tasting at a producer whose back-vintage library most visitors never see.

The Blue Mountains Private Tour with Kangaroo and Koala Experience strips away the group-tour bottleneck and replaces it with a guide who adjusts the day's pace and route to weather, light, and your interests. On a clear May morning you might begin at a lesser-visited lookout where the Three Sisters catch the low autumn sun and the sandstone glows almost orange against the grey-green eucalyptus canopy below, the air carrying the sharp, medicinal scent of oil volatilising off gum leaves in the cool air. The wildlife sanctuary component places you inside open kangaroo enclosures where eastern greys lope up and nudge your hand for pellets, their fur surprisingly soft and warm, their breath grassy and sweet. Koala encounters are structured for proximity. You stand close enough to hear the animal's slow, raspy breathing and see the individual hairs of its dense wool coat, and the private format means no jostling for position with forty other visitors.