A £14,000 Taxi Fare
Taxis can be expensive but £16,000 must be a pretty long trip. And so this one is. The entire journey is 4,000 miles and takes passengers into the outback of Western Australia.
So what’s so special about this one? Has some footballer or Hollywood film star with more money than sense decided to get some PR by “disappearing” in the outback? Is this another way of raising money for Sport Relief now that the English Channel has been swum and water skied?
No this is another ingenious idea from Australia to help publicise their country and get some more visitors. Last time, you might remember, it was Queensland that ran an international competition to find a warden to write a diary for 6 months on an island. This time it is Western Australia.
Doug Slater was named the state’s favourite tax driver last week and, as such, has the honour of driving the winners of a competition, The Extraordinary Taxi Ride, to the top tourist destinations in the state. No winner will visit all but will travel in the taxi for between 4 and 9 days to see some of the sites. He gets $A25,000 (about £14,000) for his trouble (and hopefully, petrol money!) for ferrying the eleven pairs of winners around. Each of the pairs of winners will have a different itinerary and, in the competition, you can pick a route that appeals to you. All of the taxi rides happen between the 9th April and 14th of June so you do need to be able to go at almost the drop of a hat if you win one of the early dates.
So can you be a winner?
The competition is open to people living in Oz itself. New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, Germany and the U.K. and is part of a $A5.6 million tourism campaign to highlight the state.
So, if your interested, how can you enter?
Go to http://www.extraordinarytaxiride.com.au where you can enter and see the journey for each of the eleven rides. You have got until March 21st.
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