It doesn’t feel like all too long ago that I was sitting drafting the first of my Lip articles about travelling Australia on my own. When my travels were stretched out in front of me, it felt like forever, but now that it’s almost over it seems my endless days are numbered. I can now…
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When I think of backpacking, I think of dragging a battered backpack along the road and changing from buses to trains to coaches to trains to buses. I’m not sure if this next admission will make me lose my Backpacker Cool Points (Ha… like I had any of them) but in the whole time I’ve…
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Since September, I’ve felt like I’ve been constantly moving. Whether it was driving down the west coast, or across the Nullarbor or the Great Ocean Road, or flying to Sydney and then flying to Hobart and roadtripping around Tassie. I have just over two months left on my visa and I’m staying in Victoria. I…
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When I last wrote, I was about to embark across the Nullarbor, the iconic journey spanning the lower part of Australia. I’d been warned that the Nullarbor was, well, a bit tedious after you get over the fact that there is nothing above knee height in view for possibly three days. The novelty wears thin….
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I’m writing this while sitting in a soggy Kombi watching out the window as the predicted thunderstorm rolls in. When I first arrived in Sydney all those months ago, I was talking with a woman in a hostel who said that the south-west was her favourite place in Australia. She described the white beaches, the…
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Saying goodbye is never easy and after travelling with the same people for nine weeks, it was especially hard. But after our goodbyes, Leya (the only one from our original road trip) and I packed up Sunnie and met up with two girls that Leya knew from her previous travels in Port Douglas. So armed…
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It feels like forever since I last wrote a column and I guess, in some ways, it has been forever since we left Broome. From there we took the Great Northern Highway down the coast and made our way slowly but surely towards Perth. At our greatest, the West Coast road train weighed in at…
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One of the best pieces of advice I could give to someone who is thinking of travelling is not to make concrete plans. The beauty of travel is the spontaneity of it and if you have a strict itinerary that you have to stick to, you’re going to miss out on a lot. In my…
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I am of firm believer that everyone should go on a road trip at least once in their lives. I don’t mean a long car journey somewhere – that doesn’t count. I mean a proper road trip. One that lasts days of driving to places, and stopping when you feel like it. One where you…
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At the moment, I’m in a rather enviable position compared to most foreign backpackers in Australia. I have just had the last of my 88 days signed off for my second year Visa and I have only been here for just over four months. Now I have almost eight months up my sleeves to…
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I’ve found one of the best things about travelling is that even in the oddest of scenarios, like spending time on a mango farm about a half hour drive from the nearest town, you find people you have lots in common with. Ashley, Jess and Rosy are fellow solo travellers and they kindly agreed to…
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One of my favourite things about Australia, and something that I didn’t realise before I came here, was how diverse its landscape is. I knew Australia was vast but my idea of this crazy country was pretty much similar to one of those maps you see on Tumblr or Buzzfeed: People living on the coast,…
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Before I landed in Darwin, I knew I was going to love it. I have always been the kind of girl who rooted for the underdog and, when it comes to Australian cities, I think it’s safe to say that Darwin is the underdog. Maybe it hasn’t got the beaches that Sydney has, or the…
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I had a lot of time to think about things while I was bouncing down dirt tracks on my way back to Alice Springs after a month-long jaunt in the Outback. My thoughts were mostly, ‘I hope those cows on the side of the road aren’t going to suddenly launch themselves in front of this…
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