Whether you’re staycation-ing or vacationing, CD Traveller tells you what’s hot and what’s not in the travel world

Tasmania, an island off the southern coast of mainland Australia, is not served by any international flights from the UK. To get there you need to fly from some other Australian major city. The state capital , Hobart, is served by just a small airport so getting in and out of it is quick and easy.

But at this time of the year Hobart can be known the world over because this is the winning line for one of the most famous ocean races in the world, the Sydney Hobart. This can be a gruelling race that begins on Boxing Day on the spacious Sydney Harbour in New South Wales and ends about 2 days later in a much smaller Sullivans Cove in Hobart.

You’ll be aware about my previous thoughts on car hire and car hire companies. You need to be wary as they try to ratchet up the basic price they use to lure you in to rent their cars. But they have another sneaky approach. When you hire a car in the UK, you pay for any damage up to the first three hundred pounds or whatever it is and then you can pay a daily sum to reduce that figure.

Every August, some 20,000 tourists flock to the town of Bunol (in the Valencia region of Spain) to hurl large, red squishy tomatoes at one another. La Tomatina – the world’s largest vegetable fight – is a full blown fiesta and in the week building up to the battle, Bunol is filled with fireworks, food, street parades and parties. However the undisputed highlight of the festival is the tomato fight which takes place between 11am and 1pm on the last Wednesday in August.

Like every city in the world, Sydney can be as expensive as you like or be seen on a budget. Assuming you are already in Sydney, all the things I am going to suggest will cost you nothing.

Let’s start with two iconic sites; the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House. If you want to climb to the top and be led across the bridge it will set you back over $A180 (say £90) but you can walk across it for nothing.

Being brought up in Sydney , Australia means that I have some antipathy towards Melbourne. But even then, the current advertising slogan being used to attract people to Melbourne seems pretty uninspired if not downright daft.

Well what better way to depart from the shivering cold of a mid-winter English morning than to take a flight to Australia aboard one of Qantas Airway’s brand new Airbus A380-800 super-jumbo jets.

This particular aircraft only came in to service all but a few days ago so. The cabin crew are still removing the wrapping paper and discovering gadgets and spaces that they never knew existed. Without doubt this behemoth of an aircraft is something to wonder at.

In the words of Corporal Jones, “Don’t Panic.”This isn’t happening over here, this is happening in Newcastle, NSW in Australia.According to the Sydney Morning Herald, from December 13th until January 10th, there will be no air traffic controllers working at this airport which has about 1 million passengers flying through it per year. (that makes [...]