What Vehicle Is Best To Travel Australia In?

Road Tripping with Jess & Luke

Road trip, vanlife

Hello! We are Jess & Luke, a newly married couple that have been living on the road for the past two and a half years. We currently live out of our hi top troopy Rocket while we look for a place to settle and call home :)

Would you rather travel in the troop carrier or caravan, and why?

Ten times over we love the troopy for our style of travel, we tend to always be on the move rather than staying in one spot and we love that we can take the troopy along for the ride where ever we go. It's so handy taking everything you own with you everywhere even if it is just down to the beach for the day!

Troopy, troop carrier

Pros and cons of travelling with a caravan?

Pros would be space, the luxury of having an ensuite, and also having the ability to leave the caravan behind especially for free camps. We could always rock up early, nab the best spot, and then go out for the day and know we could come back to our home all set up. We didn't really let the caravan limit us and still stealth camped anywhere we wanted. Our big old caravan set up in beach carparks amongst the van-lifers was always pretty funny!

Cons would be not always being able to take the caravan everywhere, which meant sometimes instead of continuously moving forward to our next spot we would have to backtrack to pick it up.

Why didn’t the caravan suit your travel needs?

Fuel consumption was a big one, we were a lot slower with the caravan and we always needed to plan ahead to make sure we could get the caravan where we wanted, and if not we had to decide on somewhere safe to leave it for the day or overnight.

When we bought the caravan we had always planned to sell it straight after we finished our lap so for us using it for 12 months and getting back around to Melbourne, we saw the opportunity to sell it and make our money back so we could downsize for something more affordable and then continue our lap.

Was the caravan expensive to run?

Not at all! We had a really amazing power set up so it was really great off grid and it was very rare we ever had to plug into power unless we hit a bad patch of weather. The most expensive part was fuel and towing something so heavy, but the Troopy is pretty much just as thirsty as our Colorado was while towing the caravan so we haven't felt much of a difference there haha

Did the caravan limit you to where you could explore?

Only slightly, we bought an off road caravan so it did go to quite a few remote places with us which was pretty cool. We did also break the chassis (twice, oops!!) on our trip. Once near Katherine and the second time was on the Gibb River Road.

Who would you recommend a caravan to? Who would you recommend a troop carrier to?

A caravan is perfect for someone that wants to take their time and slowly do a lap or is thinking of stopping for a while and working along the way. Looking back now we kind of wished we took our time on the outer lap and stopped and worked so we could spend more time in the places we really loved. A caravan makes for a nice home base while working, you have all the same comforts of living in a house!

We see the troopy as a fun weekender or for shorter trips (maybe a few months at a time). You would have to be someone that doesn't mind roughing it, we like to stay away from populated areas and hide out so sometimes it means we go quite a few days without a shower or a real toilet! We actually both think we would've struggled in the troopy for a whole 12 months without a break.

It does get a bit hard living in there when you're stuck in rainy weather, it's definitely easy to go stir crazy in such a small space.

How do you fund your Australia road trip?

We saved our asses off for a year before we left. We estimated how much 12 months around Aus would cost us with fuel, food, and activities and saved that amount, it actually ended up being pretty spot on! We went a whole 12 months not working at all and once we got around to Perth we were down to the last of our money and Luke luckily went back into his trade and topped us up again.

This is how we generally fund our travels now, Luke will pick up a month of work here and there and I manage all of our Instagram and content creation work.