Friday 1 February 2008

Adelaide to Melbourne

From Brisbane we flew to Adelaide and picked up our 6-berth campervan so we could meandre our way to Melbourne. This was our first go at a campervan holiday with the kids. We had six days and 1000km to cover.

CampervanKangaroo Road Sign

With all the little detours, we actually covered over 1500km. Dozen's of national parks, dozy little towns and everchanging scenery. Huge streches of beaches with pounding surf. Highlights for me were the bat caves at Naracoorte and the Tower Hill reserve where we spotted wild koala bears and kangaroo's. The Great Ocean Rd scenergy was nice but I think it's rather oversold.

However, I probably won't do a campervan holiday again.

A campervan is good if you like touring and you get to sit in the front seats. You don't get to see much in the back of the campervan and must while the time away as best as you can. A campervan is also quite awkward and ungainly to explore with or drive into a town. Note that there's no insurance coverage for overhead damage, water damange or damage caused if you go on an unsealed road. Once you arrive at a campervan park and settle in, you're pretty much stuck there shoulder to shoulder with the rest of the camping crowd.

On the plus side, the campervan isn't really camping. Ours had a microwave oven, air conditioning and even a DVD player. And it's nice always having a toilet with you unless you're the one that has to empty it.

I think it would be better to have a 4WD vehicle and tow a tent trailer or (dare I say it) a caravan. Then you can leave the tent trailer and go explore with the 4WD.

2 comments:

  1. Just spent ages catching up with this site - I have your RSS feed in my list but I think I'd assumed that the lack of updates meant that you'd not published anything rather than (maybe?) the location of the feed changing.

    Liked the sound of Sydney - hoping to maybe get out there later this year so it made for good reading :-)

    Mike.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Nope, the location didn't change. I just got a bit lazy and distracted and didn't blog for a while. Catching up now. Thanks for dropping by!

    ReplyDelete