Down Under Discovery

Customer Reviews

• AA

  Affordable

  · November 15th, 2023
  We are on the 20 day New Zealand - Australia tour. We do not recommend this tour. This review is sadly because our bus driver, Glenn, said quite a few obviously racist things about Indigenous Australians on our bus ride to and from Uluru. We have been on several Globus tours over the years, and we are very disappointed that Globus employs a company and people with this kind of harmful and backward thinking. On our trip to Uluru on Nov. 15., Glenn told us that Indigenous people are thieves. He said the Indigenous people specifically are responsible for theft in Alice Springs and along the highways. While passing Mount Ebenezer he told us that the Indigenous people are “true communists” and did a bad job running the gas station in the area, which caused the rest stop to close. Glenn then said that someone else tried to open the station again, but the Indigenous people “showed up with spears” and caused the new owner to close the gas station. He actually said, “showed up with spears.” Perhaps Glenn thinks that because it was a bus full of white people he could get away with being overtly racist. But no we are not ok with it. Racism is wrong. On this Globus trip in Australia we’ve had no access to an Indigenous Australian guide to give us a balanced viewpoint. Instead, we were given racist views about a group of people who were not there to defend themselves and add important context. I wrongly presumed we would be given some kind of properly assembled educational information about Indigenous Australian groups directly from Indigenous people, like we received in New Zealand. The “educational” video we watched on the bus to Uluru romanticized the colonization of Australia, depicting the English colonists as heroes and hard workers who earned their right to be here and makes no mention of how these colonists displaced the Indigenous people and basically stripped them of their land and culture. I had to google everything to learn more. This is literal whitewashing of history and distorts the reality of what happened. We are shocked at how blatantly outdated this driver and company are in the changing world.
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  Trip date: November 2023
• MS

  Maria

  · December 15th, 2022
  Gets to the main places but not the best planned tour. Very compressed timelines for the trip, leave you feeling rushed through many destinations. Sometimes not even enough time to eat, or no place. No suggestions or prep from guide. And yet, there's a lot of time on the bus and/or the plane - 5 hour layover for a plane to get to the hotel at midnight. Often felt disorganized - I get everything had just reopened but seems the hotels were often unprepared for us coming, excursions that people had booked for months suddenly unavailable or not booked by company. Couldn't they call in advance, for example, to make sure there's enough food at a hotel dinner??? Tour guide wasn't great
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  Trip date: September 2022