Hello Reddit Travelers

Plan:, I am currently planning trip to NZ/AUS. I have one-year working holiday visa for both countries, both of which are must be activated by January 2017 but are good for a year once activated. I am not concerned about exact details of my travels once in country at this point. The goal of this post is to get some information about the best possible way to fly from:

1) US (Washington DC area) to

2) Australia (Brisbane, Melbourne, etc.) – and work/travel for a few months (Until Nov/Dec. 2016) then fly to

3) New Zealand (Auckland, etc.) before the visa expires (NZ visa expires Jan. 2017) and stay there for a full year (From approximately late 2016 to late 2017) on that visa then fly back to the US from New Zealand.

Can anyone help me make sense of the best way to make this work – I am relatively new to international travel but I have been doing my research and trying to book one way flights for each leg of the journey, but once I try to find a flight from New Zealand back to the US I cannot book anything that far in advance (ex. Estimated departure from NZ in Nov. 2017).

I have read that without an “ownward ticket” from one country to another a traveler can be turned away so I want to make sure I have all my ownward tickets before entering each country. Does anyone have any helpful comments on how to make this type of air travel work? I am having a lot of problems figuring out how to make this work. Help is very much appreciated from people with experience. Thanks. (Background info on my trip – A low to medium budget backpacking trip involving working on farms/woofing, traveling via buses and hitching. I have enough money saved to travel comfortably (for my standards!) for this amount of time but I am pretty thrifty and will mainly be camping, woofing (work for stay on farms) and sometimes staying in backerpackers (hostels) and using couchsurfing.org. Ie. No hotels or anything like that. )