Sarah from Australia went overseas at the age of 18 and since then she has caught the travel bug. With her Toyota Hiace van she is traveling around Australia. Next stop ASIA.
I’m a 22 year old Aussie, I was born in a beautiful small country town called Bowral. I first went overseas at the age of 18 and since then have caught the travel bug. I’m a massive water baby, so love the ocean and hope to become a paramedic in the near future.
We previously wanted a larger model but due to our budget we’re unable to do so, we always wanted Toyota as they’re a very reliable and well known brand. This model really suited our needs as we realised we didn’t really need much to be happy travelling around Aus.
We’ve been on the road now for 6 months, and have no real time limit, we just work when we need to and then keep rolling on. Vin was a previous diesel mechanic and we both worked as bar tenders.
Everything was done by Vinnie, myself and our good friend Andy who is a carpenter by trade. We both really got in and tried to help and do as much where we could. Vinnie is very handy with tools and with our friends guidance the inside of the van was built.
You definitely get times where you’ve had enough of being in such a tiny space, especially when the weathers rubbish ! But we’ve learnt that we appreciate the little things much more now that we live in a tiny rolling home hHa.
Of course more space would be wonderful but we don’t feel like we need it.
We took it pretty slow building our old gal, it took us about 9-10 months just because we were also working a lot to save money.
We like to mix it up, we call it “ stealth “ camping when we’re camping in an area that doesn’t have any designated camping. We definitely prefer the free camps or camping out of populated areas, we like to be in open spaces and where’s it quiet.
The longest road so far would have to be crossing from QLD to the NT but this will soon be second as we’re about to do the Nullarbor plain which Is 1256 km.
We do ! Mainly on the easy coast of Australia, there is a lot of vannies around, the west is a lot further and we haven’t met as many.
Yess ! Ahha i particularly get annoyed at the amount of unwanted attention a van can generate, we get a lot of people starring in and not really liking the van life community for some reason. We’ve had some bad experiences with locals targeting us because we’re in a camper van.
I get really happy when I think about all our crazy and amazing experiences that our Toyota Hiace of ours has taken us on, all the rough dirt tracks and river crossings and all the disasters.
The van really makes the trip because for us it’s definitely about the journey and not just the destination because sometimes we can’t make it to the destination because we’re in a 2WD van.
We don’t, we’re currently working Vinnie as an arborist and myself a lifeguard. We’re both really outdoors kinda of people.
Currently it’s to finish our lap of Australia so we still have a long way to go we’ve got the rest of SA, the middle of the NT, VIctoria, Tasmania and then the NSW coast again. After this we’d love to do New Zealand or a south east Asia trip !
Here’s my Instagram account.
