Tips for your Australia Road Trips📌

Here are some tips you must know before you embark on your road trip around Australia.

Tip 1: Plan Your Trip

For relocations especially, as you are on a specific time schedule, I would plan your trip in advance on what places you want to stop at and the things you want to do. This will help avoid wasting time when you’re on the road as a majority of the way there is no phone service. If you aren’t travelling through relocations and have a lot of time to spare, you don’t need to worry as much, however, it’s always good to have an idea of what you want to do!

Tip 2: Booking Camp Sites

For all travellers, book your camp site ahead of time because camps can be fully booked, especially during peak season! There are a few pretty cool campsites all around Australia that are very popular to stay at, so these ones specifically you will need to book ahead of time! The app WikiCamps is a great app to have, it tells you where there are campsites, free facilities, powered etc. It costs £4.99 but is totally worth it, it helped us plan all the stops we did! If you want to save money you can also use WikiCamps to find free campsites. We bush camped a few times, where we felt was the safest to do so!

Tip 3: Bring a Net Hat

You must bring a hat with netting for your face! I don’t know what it is about the West Coast but the fruit flies are relentless! They will constantly fly all around you and love to attack your face and ears no matter how many times you swat them away. Bringing a netted hat will save you so much aggravation these little flies bring!

Tip 4: Food Prep

I would recommend that you do your grocery shopping the day before you collect your camper, especially with relocations. With campers you tend to get a fridge, stove and appliances that you can use for your meals whenever you need to stop. Some days you have to drive 8+ hours depending on the places you want to visit, so to save driving time we cooked lunch and ate it whilst we drove instead of stopping somewhere to cook. Buy big Water Canisters as you will need it for cooking/drinking etc. Just be careful not to have fresh food before crossing the state borders as sometimes your campers will be checked and any fresh food will be taken away, like fruit and vegetables. This is to avoid bringing fruit flies into other states, especially from WA.

Tip 5: Bush Camping

If you want to save money on campsites and bush camp, I would recommend bringing good portable chargers with you. We did this multiple times on our lap of Australia to save money. Having portable chargers are very handy so you can make sure all your electronics are charged for the next day of exploring.

Tip 6: Plan your fuel stops

Make sure to plan your stops for fuel or have jerry cans as a back up! Sometimes you can be driving for hours without seeing any towns or petrol stations. For our drive from Darwin to Cairns, if we didn't have our spare jerry cans, we definitely would have been in trouble! The main route to plan your stops is from Perth to Melbourne across the Nullarbor Plan, which is over 1,200 km of driving. You don‘t want to be caught out and having to fill up your camper/can at the most expensive petrol stops as sometimes it can cost a bomb!

Check out my other blogs for recommendations from our Lap of Australia. You can find them here.