G’day travellers

Welcome to my very first blog post!

I hope you had a very nice Christmas and a fabulous start into the New Year!

I did!

I’ve got used to spending Christmas alone since I left my home country, but this year I got invited to a rather big – big for me at least – family Christmas. My partners sister invited us to her home in South Australia and I was a bit nervous as it was the first time I was gonna meet her. No need at all, it was a great afternoon and night – yes, in Australia they start early and keep going all day 😉

I should mention that we are in the middle of moving home too. We lived in Broome, WA the last 3 years and we want to relocate to Darwin, NT for a bit. So after moving all our stuff to Darwin we took off down the Red Centre – unfortunately we didn’t have the time to visit Uluru (Ayres Rock), will do another day – to Adelaide.

We left the caravan (our home on wheels) at my partners sister as we are about to embark on an adventure in Tassie (Tasmania), which will be more flexible to do with just the Ute and rooftop tent.

As my partner is FIFO (fly-in-fly-out usually on a mine) I get the ‘task’ to bring the Ute from Adelaide to Melbourne (where he will land in a few days). So here I am, travelling on my own again while he is at work. That’s what I used to do in the first two years as I was on a tourist visa back then (more about all that in a different post).

So, yes, my 2025 started amazingly great! I love walking and hiking and we’ll do lots of it in Tassie. In Broome there was not much to hike, apart from the incredibly beautiful beach walks, but they don’t prepare you for climbing mountains 😉

Here I am, travelling the south coast of Australia, climbing every hill I find – in new hiking boots as my old ones were rather worse for wear, haha.

Being me, I overdid it right away. I started using that ‘health app’ you get on your smartphone… it tells me that I’ve walked 20km/day average in the last 5 days!!! Hence why, my feet are not happy and I had to slow down a bit.

Well, I planned to slow down…

Take today, I didn’t consult my hiking app to find the next decent walk, I only used WikiCamps for some nice spots to stop along the way. One of them was Tower Hill in the Tower Hill Wildlife Reserve. It had an Emu in the photo and I thought it looks like a nice place to take a lunch break. Unfortunately, it was the centre of a recreational area.

While the surroundings were insane, with Emus and Koalas, I was lured back on a track due to signs saying ‘Lava tongue’ and ‘volcano’. Just couldn’t miss out on that, haha.

Off I went and found the ‘lava’, bit disappointing, but the walk through the swamp was quite rewarding anyway. See all the tracks in the mud – Emu, Kangaroo, and what else?

The hike to the crater was not great in thongs (=flipflops) but there was no way my feet were going to go back into boots today. Absolutely stunning view of one of the most ‘recent’ volcanoes (different sources suggest between 20 to 36,000 years ago).

That much about a relaxing day – my app says I’ve done 11km today!

After that I spent a good hour finding a spot to camp – there is a free camp about half an hour out of Warrnambool, but as I was already in Warnambool and the free camp would have been in the opposite direction of where I wanted to go… Eventually I found a spot in a caravan park.

Really, avoid travelling during summer school holidays! I should know better and book ahead – just not my way of travelling though, haha.

I’ve hinted on a few things which I will cover eventually in my future posts. However, if you are dying for an answer, shoot me a message.

Over and out for today. I hope to see you back reading my next post.