Our trip around Australia in our 1984 Nissan Urvan, which we named Betty, feels like it was many, many moons ago now…7 years and 84 moons to be exact, but the memories we hold onto feel as fresh as yesterday.
This is an amazingly good thing as I just realised that somehow we’ve managed to lose almost all of our photographs from our two-year Australia trip. At the time of realisation I was devastated, but, we’re just going to have to keep the memories flowing and alive by writing them down…for you!
Introducing Betty the campervan
Urvan’s were pretty rare and my goodness were they cool vans! They were old, pretty beaten up, with no power steering, no flashy tech systems, or solar. Just vans, with pop tops, and a serious amount of character. We loved tootling along vast Australian roads in Betty and we had some of the best night’s sleep in her that we’ve ever had.
She was a simple van with everything that we needed (which wasn’t much!) to live in full-time for two years on the road and we loved her so much! We occasionally peek at Australian Gumtree just to see if she’s for sale…we’d love to ship her back to the UK if we ever found her.
Avocados anyone?
We didn’t do the usual East Coast haunt, we spent a bit of time driving around Victoria, swirling down The Great Ocean Road, back up through South Australia, and along the Great Australian Bight before embarking on what we thought was a pretty crazy drive, the Nullabor Plain (turns out this wasn’t quite so dramatic as we’d been lead to believe, but a road we did drive down at the end of our trip was unusual for a couple of backpackers…more on that later).
By the time we’d arrived in Australia, we’d already been traveling for a few months through India, Bali, and Singapore so we were pretty broke. So broke that as we came off the Nullabor Plain and down into Esperance we only had $10 to our name, but luckily we found a place to stay for free in exchange for a little bit of gardening. Which turned into paid work so we could continue our travels up through Margaret River north to where we would pick avocados for a couple of months. This was seriously hard work! But, it did mean at any given time we had about 45 avocados in Betty all ripening at different stages which meant lots of avo and poached eggs on toast (basically breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day!).
The beauty of Western Australia
We traveled up through Western Australia which has some of the most beautiful scenery and amazingly beautiful and deserted beaches. Too many times we’d stop off and be the only people on crystal white sands. We went as far north as Exmouth (pronounced Ex-mouth over there which we always had a giggle about) before returning south again as we decided to tackle Australia’s longest shortcut, The Great Central Road. We’d done a lot of driving (and I mean a lot!) by this point and I guess we felt like we wanted to leave Australia with a bang.
The Great Central Road experience
It was kind of a crazy decision heading down there in our 2WD, 20-something-year-old van on unsealed roads with wild corrugation. The corrugation was so deep in places that it made Betty’s windscreen shake. Plus I was 31 weeks pregnant! Australians had filled us with fear for attempting the road making sure we had extra wheels and extra water in case of a breakdown. One guy even asked us if we were taking a gun with us! Incidentally, no insurance providers offer cover for this particular road as it is so remote and in such bad condition.
If we were to have broken down out there it would have cost us somewhere in the region of $7,000 for a pickup and could have taken a couple of days to reach us. Even with all this information and caution we thought, what the hell, let’s go. It was a bit nerve-wracking to be fair mixed with a lot of excitement. We saw wild dingos, a herd of wild camels, just insane untouched scenery, about 73 crashed, burnt-out cars with no windows left in them (this was pretty spooky and made us wonder if we should turn back!) and almost got Betty stuck in quicksand.
The proposal
When we reached the tarmac road on the Northern Territory side of The Great Central Road Jason got out of Betty and kissed the road. We reached The Olga’s (which we thought to be far more impressive than the much more famous Uluru) just as the sun was setting and it created this immense orange glow around the rocks and it just felt incredible to have reached the other side. Whilst in Australia we didn’t meet anyone else who had traveled this route which felt pretty special. Also pretty special was that Jason proposed to me in The Garden of Eden at Kings Canyon!
Why a campervan competition?
We met you all through our custom boat competition but we wanted to let you know a little more about why we chose to do a campervan competition this time around. We have just the fondest memories of Betty and truly hundreds more tales to tell of our time in Australia, but these are just a snippet into our vanlife world which we hope to carry on again one day with our three sprogs. I kind of wish I could enter this competition to win a campervan…the irony that we don’t have our campervan or boat at the moment but we’re trying to gift these amazing prizes to you is kind of hilariously wild in itself! Such is life as they say.
Now to dig out the very few snaps I have left to accompany Part 2… stay tuned!
With love,
Mollie x
