Australia vs. Campervan

About a year ago my partner and I decided to travel Australia in 6 months in a campervan🚐... while also starting our freelance business. Say what? I know. 

Back to the beginning, september 2023. We had been planning our trip for over a year and the moment had finally arrived: we left to travel to Australia for 1 year! This had been a dream of mine since I was 16 years old and 10 years later, I made my own dream come true. I had always wanted to live in Melbourne, so that’s what we did for the first 6 months. Never having left Europe, this felt like living in a movie: scyscrapers, busy streets and lively neighbourhoods. 

But you can’t say you have been to Australia and then only go to 1 city in a country that’s the size of West Europe... So that’s when we decided to do something crazy and buy our own campervan, which we would sell again at the end of the trip. Win-win. 

You thought this was the crazy part? Did I tell you that we both set up our freelance business at that same time? We had been wanting to start as freelancers for a couple of years already, but something always came up or it was simply too expensive where we were living. Now the moment was exactly right, so we went all in. I gues you can call this the start of my digital nomad life.

For 173 days, we travelled around Australia, ‘The Big Lap’ as they call it. Equipped with our Starlink (which works amazing by the way), our laptops and a table and some camping chairs we were able to work in even the most remote ‘outback’ areas. Well, we didn’t always work a lot to be honest. But what do you expect when travelling such a beautifull country. I would say that I only put 30% of my time to work on my translation business, but this was enough to set the foundation. Life’s not about working, after all. It’s about doing what you love while... doing what you love, if that makes sense.

Our trip in numbers:

🚐 Distance travelled: 25 325 km’s (6 States & 5 time zones)

🗺️ Hours driven: about 300 (that’s about 12.5 days)

🌏 Cities visited: 82 (in 173 days)

🕷️ Spiders seen: 5 (small ones)

🦘 Kangaroos seen: tons. 

5 business skills I reinforced during this trip:

💪 Planning: I was raised with the word ‘planning’. Travelling a country this size in 6 months, you have to plan every little detail of your trip.

💪 Accepting detours: As much as you plan beforehand, there’s always something that can cause unexpected chaos. A flooded camping, a road block, no phone coverage for google maps to work...

💪 Solution-oriented thinking: This goes hand in hand with number 2. Detours don’t mean you have to panic, it’s not the end of the world and there’s always a solution!

💪 Organisation: Working for European clients with a 10h time difference, I had to organize my schedule to comply with deadlines.

💪 Budgetting: Big trips are often costly. Keeping track of your income and spendings is as important in business as in your personal life.

What’s the craziest trip you ever made or would like to make?