Waking up everyday in a different place without knowing where we will be sleeping at night time, was pure gold. That’s why we rarely planned our itinerary beforehand. Basically, we decided to follow the sun and the heat. Since we arrived in Sydney in June, winter was slowly arriving in Australia. To keep the sun by our side, all we had to do was to drive the Eastern Coast towards the North of the country. And just like that, we spent nine months under the Australian sun, never experiencing too much heat (except in the desert and Darwin, thank god we weren’t there during the summertime!!!). The weather was perfect and our itinerary in adequacy with it: during winter, we were in the North of the country, in the warmth and during summer time, we were in Tasmania, in the freshness. If you stay more than five months, it would be a good choice to do a similar itinerary, at your own pace. By traveling this way, we also got to see many different landscapes.
This was our favorite map! At the end of each day, we would take our black marker and draw a (very approximate) line of the journey we had done on that day. We forgot a few side roads but most of our itinerary is there!
From Sydney, we went up the East coast to Townsville, then from there we went inland, where our desert crossing started. We went to Darwin before going back down, driving through the country, through Alice Springs to Adelaïde. We would’ve loved to travel Western Australia too, being an area full of wildlife and beautiful scenery but sometimes we have to make traveling choices. Since we lacked money and time, we had to choose between Western Australia or Alice Springs and Uluru. It was frustrating having to choose between two awesome itineraries but we were very happy with the choice we made.
From Adelaïde, we went to Melbourne where we took a ferry to Tasmania. After spending a few months in Tasmania, we returned to Sydney from Melbourne.
This trip -reduced to a few lines on a basic website- is more than 25 000 km traveled together, in nine months. 25 000 km – 9 months – and some incredible moments, novelty hidden in every corner, a blossoming love, incredible encounters and unforgettable emotions.
The itinerary doesn’t matter much, in the end. It’s what you do with it that makes it incredible.
