East Coast Backpacking Summary

Our East Coast trip is over now :( It’s time to start the actual exchange, settle down and head towards different kind of adventures. Sari dropped off already in Sydney, Ville stayed few more days in Melbourne before returning to Finland and Roope came to Perth to study in UWA too. Anyway, I’m gonna miss you guys and our East Coast story!

Summarizing our journey, we started from Cairns at the 6^th of Jan and travelled down all the way to Melbourne and Tasmania by the 19^th of Feb. We mainly moved around by Greyhound bus, which I found quite handy, easy to book trips, many stops along the way and they provide you USB charging and free wifi (that most of the time doesn’t work for naturally in Australia you’re travelling in the middle of nowhere). Even overnight bus trips weren’t that bad after all. Another similar company (and cheaper apparently) is Premier.

The map below shows our path (my paint masterpiece). We stopped by the main attractions in the East Coast: Cairns, Magnetic Island, Airlie Beach & Whitsunday Islands, Rainbow Beach & Fraser Island, Brisbane, Surfer’s Paradise, Byron Bay, Sydney & Blue Mountains, Tasmania and Melbourne & Great Ocean Road. My favorite things were diving at the Great Barrier Reef, sailing at Whitsunday, relaxed atmosphere in Byron, Blue Mountains (the best sceneries and waterfalls) and our roadtrips in general in Tasmania and at GOR (own car and schedules gives you amazing freedom). Would be impossible to choose just one! Fraser is another thing that I’ll probably remember forever due to the extreme driving. (NB, I have gone through all these places more precisely in my previous posts from Jan and Feb 2016.)

Our route from Cairns to Sydney and throuogh Hobart to Melbourne

A bit more about the backpackers’ lifestyle – it’s all about carrying your whole life in one backpack (smaller or bigger, my 70-litre-backpack weighted 23kgs at the end instead of the 16kgs in the beginning, don’t know how, while Ville started with only 8 kilos..) You should carry as little as possible which becomes easier by time for you probably won’t even use what’s in the bottom of the backpack, at least I was too lazy to turn the whole thing upside down. Also, remember to bring an extension cord, helps a lot. Otherwise you’ll find everything from here if you happen to forget something.

Most likely you’ll live in hostels. We slept in dorms of 4-8ppl and cooked most of our food in the common kitchens, the price per night is usually between 20-40AUD. We had very clean and functional big hostels such as Gilligan’s in Cairns (best pool) and a bit smaller, cuter but also clean ones such as Aussie Way in Brisbane and Home @ the Mansion in Melbourne (unique and elegant, best bathrooms). Maybe the untidiest hostels were in Rainbow Beach (a nightmarish kitchen) and the Palms in Sydney (Relaxed and outgoing atmosphere, but our dorm looked like people had lived there for years and never come out. And there were cockroaches. Wouldn’t go again.) We booked our hostels and trips usually couple of weeks in advance, first ones already in Finland. During our road trips, Roope booked our hostels via phone the very same day, which turned out be a good idea for we ended up doing a few changes to our plans on the road, and fortunately the hostels weren’t fully booked.

The most interesting thing when backpacking is the people you meet. We’ve met many people from all around the world, younger and older than us, travelers and locals, all with different kind of stories to tell.

We met our Italian diving instructor, a former engineer who went crazy for diving and so changed career and moved to Cairns; a French couple who had an admirably curious attitude towards travelling, studied beforehand and so recognized all the fishes and animals knowing how the animals behaved, and who we met for a second time in Byron by coincidence; our skipper at Whitsunday who had quitted studying marine biology in university in order to start sailing; an Australian fifty-something woman who joined our morning yoga and at the moment was living and travelling around in a sailboat; a German teenage couple who had bought their own car and were working and driving around Australia for one year; local surfers who knew everything about the sea and shores; a Finnish constructor having his own company in Finland but working among diving in Australia during winters; super energetic South African tour bus driver with great sense of humor; French students; British jocks; Finnish au pairs who decided to leave Finland at a two-week-notice; one 28-year-old Canadian girl who had all alone travelled around Australia including the real outback; a guy in  our hostel who carried his own coffee machine, Himalayan salt and other fancy cooking stuff with him; people who gave us their food when they checked out; random people who give you big, true smiles and says “G’day” or “How is it going?” when passing by… List goes on and on.

All in all, our backpack journey so far has been a very broadening one and I could recommend Australia and backpacking in general to everyone interested in different kind of travelling.