Sydney Australia to Vancouver Canada

We are having a travelling holiday for six months and will share our experiences with you
The planning of your trip is important and can be the difference between an easy smooth holiday and a comedy of errors. Even when you have planned carefully things can go wrong such as plane cancellations due to bad weather, buses running late and you do not make your connection. It is a good idea to leave plenty of time between connections and if you are anything like me you will have a plan B in mind if anything does not link up as expected.
The first consideration is your destinations, where you want to go and then you can build your plan around that.
Even if you decide to book your trip yourself I would advise that you go and speak to a couple of travel agents because they have information that is not really available online (such as the flexibility and connections to change parts of a trip).
We flew out of Sydney on 19th December with the major idea of 'A White Christmas'. We wanted to experience the opposite to our regular Christmas in Australia so our first section of the holiday is in Canada.
We flew from Sydney to Vancouver with a stop over in Los Angeles. There are flights direct to Vancouver from Sydney but they will cost you a lot more if you are not lucky enough to get onto the few cheaper seats offered on the flight. Having the stop over in LA for 4 hours lengthens the trip so you have to be prepared for a longer travel time if you want to save yourself money. From Australia you need a White Paper (Visa Waver) to be able to enter the US even if you are there for a stop over and do not leave the airport, you can get that Visa Waver online, print it out and present it at Customs with your passport on entering the US. The flight from Los Angeles to Vancouver is about three and a half hours.
Canadian prices have not got tax included so you have to add from 6% or up to 13% (tax varies from state to state) onto all displayed and ticketed prices. It is also a state that you tip for service and the etiquette of tipping in Canada is to add between 10% to 15% for service such as taxi service, porter service and restaurant service etc. 
Vancouver in BC (British Columbia) is a lovely city and we would have liked to have spent more time there but had committed to flights to Cranbrook BC where we planned to base ourselves so we just had 2 nights in Vancouver before flying out. The bus transport in Vancouver is excellent, it runs regularly and costs $2.50 for a ticket so it is a very inexpensive way to get around.


We arrived in Cranbrook BC and will take trips out from there to see the BC and Alberta states of Canada .