Hi mates,
after 1 ½ weeks of rain, finally, the sun came out again. From Mission Beach, we continued our travel down the coast and now we have travelled 1700 kilometres. During this time the landscape changed much. From the rainforest to a “normal climate” but most of all we saw sugar cane and banana plantations, like in the pictures below.
As many people asked how we were planning our trip, I’ll tell you now:
While staying in Germany we didn’t plan much. We knew that our journey was about to begin in Cairns but “Why Cairns?”. Well, there are various reasons: At first, we want to travel down the east coast and then continue until Perth. As we don’t want to travel some roads twice we knew that our travel had to begin in Cairns or Perth. After that, we had to decide whether to start in Cairns or Perth. Since Cairns is a tropical city and both of us don’t like the very hot weather too much, we accorded to start in Cairns and to head of the hot. Another reason is, that many backpackers begin their journey in Melbourne or Sydney and we didn’t want to do this as well – but for the moment this was our only plan.
The first time driving down the coast we just plant day by day where we’d go next. After a few days on the road, we thought about actually travelling to Perth as the way is very long and it may be more difficult to sell our car in Perth than in Melbourne or Sydney. Anyway, we decided to do it as the west coast seems to be very gorgeous. Furthermore, we’ll never know if it may be easier to sell a car at another point.
In the meantime, we’ve gotten “very organized”. At least we know more or less where we want to go: Our next big stop is Brisbane on Saturday. After that, we’re going to travel to Sydney and go on through Canberra until Melbourne, where we want to be around Christmas. Furthermore, we’re driving to kangaroo island and afterwards to Adelaide and at the end the south coast along and the west coast up until Perth, where we want to work as well.
I think it isn’t good to plan too much before arriving in Australia as you don’t know how big the distances are nor how much you want to travel per day. That’s also why we’re still planning day by day where we’re heading next to.
Here are a few pictures of our “baby” that’s the name we gave our van:
However, there are a few things to tell about our last days: As it rained that much we couldn’t do much stuff. One day we wanted to visit some waterfalls but after driving for half an hour we got to a gravel road and as it was still raining we were afraid of continuing driving and headed back. But there were also wonderful things we did the last days – for example, seeing kangaroos having breakfast at the beach in Cape Hillsborough National Park.
Or staying at the Alkoomi Adventure Farm, where we read much, spent time playing games, cooking, playing with the lovely puppies Mac and Bull, doing horseback riding and quad and motocross riding. We had a really lovely time at the farm.
The day after we visited the Town of 1770, where James Cook arrived in Australia for the first time. Not knowing where to go we just kept driving until the street ended at a little parking place. From there we went down to the beach and spotted various dolphins.
Due to the fact that many backpackers told us that they don’t know what to cook all the time and also because many people at home asked me what we were cooking, we decided to share our fav recipes with you. At the button “recipes” we’ll update the page with our fav recipes at the road and at home. Obviously, you’ll also find the recipes in our blog.
See you soon,
Fiana