sorry, coming soon 🙁

Well, after three hours in an uncomfortable plane we left Australia after 125 days. Somehow a very weird feeling as this short “jump” to New Zealand doesn’t feel very different to the other journeys we made through Australia. Anyway, it might be a good point to write a short summery for Australia, who knows who ...

So we arrived in Melbourne, our last stop in Australia. Having slept accordingly, we were relaxed and talked to everyone. We weren’t in a rush, as 1 week to explore a city should be enough time. The two British couchsurfers (one of them Scottish with a really difficult accent) couldn’t find another accommodation in Melbourne ...

We got up very early the next day for two reasons: first we had another 2.5 hour drive to Canberra and the car had to be returned at 10 am. Additionally, we wanted to see the sunrise, but unfortunately it was quite cloudy why we couldn’t see anything and we directly started to drive. We ...

The most interesting part of Batemans Bay is the further north Murramarang National Park, as it includes three dreamful beaches (Pebbly, Pretty and Depot Beach) and a beautiful river into the ocean in North Durras. But before we came there we visited two other beach cities, namely Bendalong and Narawallee (incl. Mollymook). The beaches weren’t ...

We arrived at Jervis Bay during the afternoon and had beautiful weather. Tobi found a little bay with turquois water (Currarong) at the northern end of the bay. There is another Rock Pool there as well. Just a gorgeous area! We stayed the night in a camp ground in Huskisson in order to explore Jervis ...

To see a bit of the coastline between Sydney and Melbourne, we rented a last time a small red car. Unfortunately the first day started directly with a lot of rain. But anyway, we didn’t want to miss a few highlights around Kiama: the Cathedral Rocks, a rocky formation that indeed resembles a church, and ...

So here we are, the world famous Blue Mountains… They are mostly famous for the fact that they are one of the “nature” spots in Australia which are easy to access by car or train (which is a bit of a contradiction but anyway). As we already figured out before, “experiencing” the nature bush in ...

Steve’s sister Leanne picked us up at the train station and welcomed us so lovely including offering us nice dinner. Anyway, her two dogs welcomed us before: Alex and Diesel. One of them is 4 years, the other one is around a year old and therefore very active. The two are Pitbull Terrier and very ...

After Tobi made friends with two Dutch girls on the campground, the drive the next day to the highway was no problem at all. The two girls planned to go north, but until the highway we had the same way. Somehow we made it to put our luggage and the four of us into their ...

Before we made our way from Coffs Harbour to Port Macquarie, we had to prepare a sign. Slowly, Kerstin started to like preparing it 🙂 Done with that, we had to reach the highway. The right spot for hitchhiking is important, that’s what we already learned. We walked a bit confused and without sign, cause ...

Today should be our longest hitchhike, 400km from Byron Bay to Coffs Harbour. After it literally rained the whole night, also into the tent, we had a little lake in our tent (well, it was only a 32$ tent), and tried to convert it into a transportable condition in order to leave after breakfast. This ...

Back to Brizzy – Australian word for Brisbane – we directly took a train to the world famous Gold Coast. There we found a couchsurfer for 5 days: Joshua. He is as old as we and trains for his first marathon in L.A. which will be in May. Unfortunately exact one day before we arrive ...

Before we arrived in Noosa, we made a stopover in the Great Sandy National Park, with the Rainbow Beach as its main attraction. Helen and Myra from Fraser Island said, that we MUST go there, because there is sand in all colours you might imagine. A word a blow. The main beach, where we made ...

Before we arrived in Hervey Bay (at our next couchsurfer, this time a German expat called Axel), we wanted to see the beach of Agnes Water, because Steve described it as the best one in this area. It’s definitely a nice one without many people and so we spent there some hours. After a small ...

From Mackay we went back to Gladstone. Actually, we thought about directly going to Hervey Bay, but on the one hand, we had some buffer and on the other hand it would have ended in a complete day in the car. That’s why we decided to make another stop in Gladstone at our couchsurfer Stephen, ...

We found two couchsurfers for Mackay, each of them for one night. The first one was Dish. We are actually still not sure if it is his real name or a nickname. He is, anyway, a very relaxed guy around 30 years old, originally from Los Angeles and in Australia since 8 years. Until now ...

Unfortunately we couldn’t find a couchsurfer for Airlie Beach, also nobody answered on our request, but ok. That’s why we started to search for a camp ground. As we had to drive through the city centre, we were really shocked and were close to turn around, because Airlie Beach is absolutely THE tourist city. There ...

After a quite cosily driving to the entrance of the national park and a subsequent drive over hedge and ditch (which was fun due to our SUV), we arrived late afternoon in the campground at the gorge. After a nice chat with the lady at the reception the plan for the evening was set. We ...

We originally chose Gladstone because we thought we might get the chance to visit the Great-Barrier-Reef from there. On the other hand, we knew before that the tours were too expensive. These cost 190$ for a 5 hours boat tour in order to spend two hours on a bird-poo-island calles Lady Musgrove (Indeed, the island ...

The first day, we had to pick up our car. A wonderful Nissan Dualis (one could nearly say an SUV). We had even a car passenger for the first day, a finish guy called Mikey. Yes, you heard it correctly, neither German (50 % of all backpackers in Australia) nor French (48 %), but Finish, ...

The overnight train was very comfy as we both could sleep almost without any interruptions. That’s definitely a recommendation whoever want to do this trip in the future. While we were sitting in the bus to our accommodation, we experienced what it means to be in the middle of the summer in Queensland. We were ...

The event company for which we already worked a couple of times in Perth, was looking for staff for the 3-day music festival Lost Paradise in Glenworth Valley (30/12-01/01), around 100km north of Sydney. We wanted to use this chance and applied for all possible positions. We got both rosters for 40h as bartender. Additionally, ...

After we tried for a long time to get a couchsurfer in Sydney and didn’t succeed (understandable cause it was Christmas), we booked a room in an apartment through AirBnb (was indeed cheaper than the worst hostel in Sydney). The apartment was quite central (10min to the CBD) and our hosts also very friendly. They ...

After the last night in our camper (again on a parking spot along the highway), we had to clean the camper, do the luggage and drive to Melbourne in order to return our camper. It figured out to be a not too easy process. The poor guy from the renting company didn’t know anything about ...

After visiting the Grampians we drove until late night towards the Great Ocean Road (which was apparently quite exciting because of all the night active animals in the park). When we finally found a good spot to park, it was close to midnight why we all fell asleep immediately. The next morning was waiting with ...

You have two options if you want to drive from Adelaide to the beginning of the Great Ocean Road. One of them is to drive around 600km along the coastline, the other one goes inland before leading to the coast through the Grampians National Park. We chose the second option since Kyle (couchsurfer from Esperance) ...

We finally arrived in Adelaide after our two days driving adventure. We spent the evening at the Brighton Beach south of the city centre to relax and watched the sunset on the beach of the camping site. After having a refreshing shower the next day, we headed to the centre of Adelaide via Metro in ...

It’s quite a long drive from Esperance to Aidelaide, so to say 2268km. Just to set this in a better context, the distance between Garmisch-Partenkirchen (the most southern city of Germany) and Flensburg (the most northern city of Germany) is 1000km. So we crossed Germany twice in 2 days. The difference between Esperance and Adelaide ...

It’s an around 5 hours’ drive between Albany and Esperance which was so far the longest at the south coast, but we’ll beat that, promised. So we arrived in Esperance at around 4PM but since our couchsurfing host had to work we spent the time with a drive on the Ocean Drive. This one makes ...

When we arrived in Albany we got a bit disappointed. Even though we arrived at the mechanics almost one hour before closing they told us to come back the next day. A bit annoyed, we made our way to a couchsurfing host, who let us stay for one night. Rachel was super kind and helpful ...

After seeing and tasting Margaret River, we wanted to start our journey towards Albany. We were really looking forward to seeing the ways, because they should lead us through a huge forest area, the Shannon Forest. The ways were indeed really nice, until at some point, we saw thick smoke clouds above the forest. Probably ...

Margaret River itself is a small, not very impressive city, but additionally it’s a region famous for wineries, breweries, distilleries, chocolatiers etc. (a bit like Swan Valley in Perth). We spend the Sunday morning with tasting wines and beer in Cheeky Monkey, another beer and cider tastings in a German brewery (Duckstein). Later we continued ...

While driving to Busselton, Tobi got a message from our event company, who needed additional staff for a concert in Busselton. So he could earn a bit additional money for the trip and Kerstin had a night of partying with Vera in Busselton (as far as this was possible in this very rainy, windy and ...

Finally time has come: after 7 weeks on the West coast we made our way to Australia’s east coast. On our way along the south coast we didn’t want to miss the most important sights. As a rented car itself was not too expensive, but the so called one-way fees were around 2500$ in addition ...

Be warned, the post has much text but only a few pictures… J Week 1: After we cleaned the car a bit and dropped it off on Monday, we went to the city in order to organize some stuff (e.g. printing of our CVs). In the afternoon we met Michelle (the second couchsurfer, who borrowed us the ...

After an exceptional short drive (3 hours) we arrived in Denham at our next Couchsurfing host Paul and his young labrador bitch (we didn’t know this meaning of the word) Birra. First some words about his “apartment”: It looked like an old fabric building with a container in the back for office and sanitary. This ...

From the Karijini National Park back to civilization it’s around 700km. We decided to go to the “city” Carnarvon, as people told us it’s so pretty and because s the whole way to Monkey Mia would have been too long. There are not that many attractions, but anyway there is a very beautiful beach, the ...

We arrived at Karijini after an approximately 8 hour drive. As soon as you leave the coast and drive inland, it’s getting hotter: 40°C during the day and even in the night still around 27°C. With the first steps in the red sandstone of the national park (which would later cause quite a headache) we ...

After an exceptional short drive (nearly 2 hours) we moved to our new hosts. This time it was a married couple around 50 years old with their 3 years old son Kevin. Of course it was a different couchsurfing experience than the once we had before but definitely not worse. They welcomed us very warm ...

After staying another day in the car (we really underestimated the distances) we arrived at Coral Bay. After visiting the city (2 campgrounds and 1 hotel) we went to the beach: a beach with white sand and amazing crystal-clear turquoise water and corals. Unfortunately the corals reachable by swimming were dead and only a few ...

Finally we arrived at our very first national park. Kalbarri is a little fishing village, mainly consisting of hotels, hostels and camping grounds and of course a supermarket. But of course this concept exists everywhere where tourists appear so it was neither the first we saw nor the last one we’ll see. There is another ...

One has to know that Perth is the most isolated city in the world. You recognize it just by driving further out of Perth. Then you easily find villages being over 600km away from each other and in-between no civilization beside so called “Roadhouses” providing a fuel station and service area. A comparison illustrates the ...

Nun also (endlich) in Australien gelandet… Anschließend 2 Stunden warten am Zoll, Drogenkontrolle (mit Drogenspürhund), eine 1-stündige Busfahrt Richtung Stadt und schon waren wir bei unserem 2. Couchsurfing Host angekommen: Brodie, in unserem Alter, ein unglaublich netter und witziger Australier, mit einem ähnlichen Sinn für sarkastischen Humor wie ich (und dafür muss man nun extra ...