Three weeks on the road around Australia – The Good, The Bad and The Unexpected

We just completed three weeks on the road around Australia! We left New Zealand – see highlights of our travels here past one year, and started our 2 month road trip around Victoria, Tasmania, New South Wales and Queensland. The past three weeks we have done the travelling via rented cars and taking the ferry to Tasmania and back. We have stayed in different family friendly accommodations – a mixture of motels, cottages, resorts, couchsurfing, and staying with friends.  We are really looking forward to the next four weeks of our trip as we will be doing this via campervan travel, with Britz Campervans.

Britz campervan during our trip to South Island, New Zealand.

We will be picking up the campervan in Sydney and returning in Cairns in May. I will tell you at the end of this post why we are so excited about having our own mobile home the next four weeks as we travel through some of the most beautiful spots in Australia. For now – Wrap up from the past three weeks.

The Good

Seeing so much wildlife…and in their natural environments too! kangaroos, wallabies, wombats, koalas, pademelon, rays, several species of birds, and many more native animals at sanctuaries as well,  including the Tasmanian Devil. Just a glimpse of all that we saw, mostly in Tasmania, some on the Great Ocean Road and some along the Sapphire Coast, New South Wales. See our posts on Phillip Island and Bonorong Wildlife Sanctuary to see what else we saw 🙂

king parrot

pademelon or Rofous Wallaby

galla

koala

pelican

wallaby

Learning on the road and lots of family time

We have taken the kids out of school for the next 4 months and they are both happily learning so much during our travels – water cycles, nutrient cycles, flora and fauna, lots of writing, some maths and a whole lot more! See here for Shahaar’s first blog post. 3 weeks together 24/7 and still not too sick of one another 🙂

learning about water cycle

Stunning natural landscape – 

Such diversity in landscape from all the different places we have been visiting! Rainforests, scrubland, alpine forest, coast, beaches and mountains. People had told us, we would be driving from one beautiful place to another with lots of nothingness in between. So far we didn’t have much of that at all. Partly because we always took the scenic longer route by having the luxury of time with slow travel. We also visited so many national parks 🙂

Pebbly Beach

Nobbies, Phillip Island

Australia Hole, Narooma

12 Apostles

Alpine National Park

Cradle Mountain National Park

Wineglass Bay

granite rocks, Freycinet National Park

Fresh oysters and all the other local produce 

oysters at east coast, Tasmania

fresh oysters, Narooma

Catching up with old friends and making new friends

We have enjoyed staying at a variety of accommodation from luxury resorts, to quaint cottages by the sea, to comfortable and convenient family friendly motels, homes of wonderful couchsurfers who so generously hosted us in Tasmania and New South Wales and of course the wonderful friends we have stayed with in Melbourne, Ocean Grove and Shepparton. It’s been fun meeting new people but also hanging out with friends we haven’t seen in years.

Melbourne

The Bad

• Not fun travelling when sick – This was a low point in the travels so far. Kids got really sick after Tasmania, Ashique followed suit. At one point we had to stop travelling and stay with friends for a few days for everyone to recover.
• Going over the budget – Australia is expensive, not as bad as we had been told and actually quite similar to New Zealand. But definitely not cheap! We are finding it hard to stay within the $100 a day for four of us. And this is with doing the minimum paid attractions. Not sure what will happen when we get to Great Barrier Reef!
• Road Kill – We have never seen this much road kill ever 🙁 And after seeing these animals in the wild – echidnas, wallabies, wombats – not to mention how endangered the Tasmanian Devil are, it was quite sad seeing so much dead animals on the road.
• Lack of information on aboriginal history and knowledge in all the places we visited. We were quite shocked by this as during our travels in New Zealand, every place had so much information on Maori history. Perhaps this will change once we head to Queensland?

The Unexpected

• We didn’t realize how cold Tasmania was or how cold parts of Victoria was as well during Autumn. We were not prepared with warm clothes at all for single digit temperatures at some of the places – Cradle Mountain and Alpine National Park in particular.

• Not realizing how much of a detour Alpine National Park was – mountain roads really slow you down! We had already lost a few days with the kids being sick. After that we wanted to be somewhere for a few days before making our way to Sapphire Coast. We choose Falls Creek as it seemed on the way, but the winding mountain roads really slowed us down and made Shahaar and I very car sick as well. Pretty but not for people prone to car sickness.

• Realizing that whilst we are still happy to host couchsurfers at our own place, we just don’t feel comfortable when we are couchsurfing ourselves. So far all our couchsurfing hosts have been great, but we are never relaxed enough to enjoy our stay and I don’t think we will be going down this line of travel unless we have to – happy to host people at our homes in the future 🙂

What we have covered in 3 weeks – almost 3700km as we did several shorter trips to places on this route

Two big things we are looking forward to the next four week of our campervan travels

• Freedom and Class A Views!

This is by far the top reason we prefer travelling in a campervan. We like exploring off the beaten sites, unknown hidden gems, and unexpected places that pop up on our radar as we travel. A good example would be pebbly beach, Murramah National Park. We were driving from Narooma to Wollongong and had already booked accommodation there. We stopped at Pebbly beach as it was recommended by another travel blogger. We did a lovely forest drive and entered pebbly beach caravan sites. Wild kangaroos, beautiful beach, lovely forested campsite. If we had been in our campervan, we would have stayed here for the night or two!

Pebbly Beach, Sapphire Coast, NSW

Murramarang National Park

Saving costs and cooking our own food

We love our coffee in the morning, we love good food. Budget travel doesn’t allow that and many a times during this trip, we have had to have bad junk food and most days we paid $9 for coffee on the road. When your budget is $100 a day including hotel, food and fuel, it is quite a luxury to spend 10% on coffee (and another 10% on alcohol :-P) Carrying our kitchen with us on the campervan allows us to save that extra $10-30 we would have spent on coffee and sandwiches. We also buy organic and local produce every opportunity we can and this is not possible when we are having to pick up milk by a petrol station before we check into a motel.  We are looking forward to freshly brewed coffee in the morning sitting outside our campervan and most times with the best of views!

Example of what we cook when travelling by campervan – Khichuri which is a typical bengali meal, rice, lentils and spices

Next Phase of our travels around Australia

We picked up our campervan from Britz office in Sydney located at the airport. Quite convenient as we dropped off our Hertz car rental there as well. The kids were ever so excited about setting up ‘home’ again after 3 weeks on the road! The lady at the front desk was friendly and helpful and within no time we had signed off on all the paperwork and we were ready to set off.

Britz Campervan

We learnt several lessons from our previous three campervan trips around New Zealand and one of them is being organized and efficient with belongings from day one – having designated areas for clothes, food, accessories, books etc. This will be our home for 30 days and no one wants to live in a pig sty (the kids don’t mind too much but we are not that keen.) Once everything was set up, we buckled up and headed to our first campsite  – Lane Cove River caravan park. Adventure awaits 🙂

Poolside at Lane Cove River Tourist Park

At Lane Cove River Tourist Park

3 weeks Australia road trip – good, bad and unexpected

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