4 weeks of campervan travels around Australia – promotional discount for you at the end!

It’s been a few weeks now that we have completed four weeks of campervan travel around Australia, driving from Sydney to Cairns mostly along the coast, with a few detours inland in some places. Prior to that we did 3 weeks of travels around Victoria, Tasmania and Melbourne, by car and ferry. 7500 km, 49 days, 14 National Parks, several wildlife sightings and lots of adventures in between!  I have already written several posts on specific places we have visited. Below are some of the highlights, our best moments as well as the shortcomings and what we would do different. Perhaps it can help other families plan their campervan travel in Australia more efficiently. I am pretty sure some of these images will make you want to visit Australia too 🙂

rex point lookout, Queensland

Tea Gardens, Queensland

Mossman Gorge, Queensland

Sunshine Beach, Noosa

Lake McKenzie, Fraser Island

Daintree National Park

Lake McKenzie, Fraser Island

Port Stephens, Nelson Bay

Gold Coast

The Good

I have said this before and I say again – the top reason for loving campervan travel…FREEDOM! One of the things we love about travelling is being able to explore off the beaten track, unknown hidden gems, and unexpected places that pop up on our radar as we travel. Perfect example right at the beginning of our campervan journey – we had set off from Sydney upto Newcastle and onwards to Port Stephens (one of our favourite spots in the whole trip) and then we decided to have a break from the coast.

Big 4 Coconut Holiday Resort

We looked at the map, found a national park that looked interesting and off we went! Now of course this is possible in a car as well, but not having to worry about booking accommodation or where to get food, makes these detours whole lot easier. We love the flexibility that comes with carrying your own bed and food with you! We like a place, we stay three days and if we don’t like it, just move on to the next. You can see from the pictures, there is so much diversity and range of campervan sites – from isolated spots in the middle of nowhere, to castles to big resort style campervan sites!

Paronella Park

Gloucester River Campgrounds

• Home cooked Meals from fresh, local and whenever possible organic produce – all cooked by our very own gourmet chef Ashique. Plus cooking by the fire, roasting marshmallows, eating fresh fruits from roadsides, all made for some memorable meals on the road!

Communal Dining Space

• Down time to relax, read and catch up blog and school work

Relaxing by Sharp Creek River Bend Campground

travel schooling

• Amazing Wildlife! Just a handful of all the wildlife we saw during the 30 days of campervan travel

turtles

turtle in the water

carpet snake

fruit bats

humpback dolphin

cormorant

saltie

The Bad (in no particular order)

• We were recommended wiki app for finding campervan sites but we did not find it very useful and ended up using campermate which we had used in New Zealand. Even then, there were many sites that were not listed which we came across whilst driving. I guess Australia is at a different scale to New Zealand where the app had proved far more useful and updated.
• Not finding free sites that were scenic which was the case in New Zealand most of the time. Instead the free spots here were mostly roadside parking for truck stops with basic toilets.  We did enjoy one where we were next to the railway line and woke up to wallabies outside our van!

wallabies

• Personal space – forget about it! Be prepared for very little adult time, very little own time and being in the same space for 30 days allowed for lot of sibling fights as well. But we came out of it at the end wanting to do more adventures like this, so guess it wasnt too bad 😉

Us time mostly only in pictures 😀

• Our road trip coincided with school holidays in Victoria and New South Wales, as well as during Anzac holiday long weekend. This is good for regular holidaymakers, bad for people like us who are not at work or school. Many places were really crowded like Lamington National Park and Phillip Island.

What we would do different next time – lessons learnt from bumps on the road

Get a 4 wheel drive campervan –

There were so many places we wanted to go in Australia which is only accessible via a 4 wheel drive. We had to rent a car separately for Fraser Island as well as Great Sandy National Park and there were parts in Queensland we couldn’t go to because we didn’t have such a vehicle.

Managing Time

Drive not more than 3-4 hours a day – Leaves enough time to do an activity and set up camp. Also not do this everyday and stay at sites minimum 2 days, if possible 3 days. We realized this worked out great for us but it did take a few trial and error to get to this and I talk about this – the balance between rest and play – more in detail here.

Look after stuff better!

We are normally good with looking after our gadgets and electronics, but on this trip, we managed to break both kindle screens within a week of starting the trip 🙁 Lesson learnt from this – Make sure kindles are in proper cases and put away safely. Still not sure why it happened as we had always travelled with the kindles on other road trips the same way. The positive spin to this happening is the fact that we found lots of charity stores and really cool book stores in several of the towns we passed through.  One of the shops we absolutely loved was The Shop in the Bush as well finding the lovely bookstores at Eumundi Market near Noosa. We spent hours here but did end up with lots of second-hand books!

A third of all the books we bought!

One more thing to add to the good, which is quite specific for us at the moment – We are moving to Bangladesh – in fact by the time I post this we will be in Bangladesh already – it is the first time we will be living there as a family of four, the kids have spent all their life in UK and one year in New Zealand. It will be a big change for them and I am really glad this 49 days together and the last 30 days squashed together in a campervan has really allowed for some serious family bonding and quality time together!

Cape Tribulation

Fraser Island

Enjoying the moment

Barrington Tops National Park

To be able to do an epic road trip around Australia –  happy to have crossed this item on our ever-growing travel bucketlist 🙂

Thank you for following our journey to date..we have partnered with Britz campervan who will offer 5% discount to our readers if you book with them by 30th June. Just follow the link here to do so, you will be in for the adventure of a lifetime 😀

<div align="center"><a href="http://selimfamily.com" title="The Selim Family Raasta"><img src="http://www.travelnotesandbeyond.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/wekpost1-e1432530947416.jpg" alt="The Selim Family Raasta" style="border:none;" /></a></div>

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