Van Life Australia
What is Van Life?
Are you curious about Van Life Australia? Maybe you’ve seen pictures of attractive young couples looking wistfully out the back door or their boho-decorated van at the sun setting over a beautiful beach. This is the image of Vanlife that is romanticised on social media.
While we are no longer young, and this image certainly doesn’t reflect our everyday life, we have embraced living the vanlife. Our nomadic spirits love waking up somewhere new every day. While not every sunrise is over looking a beautiful beach or forest setting, if we don’t like where we are, we can simply move on.
If you’re contemplating taking on Van life in Australia, converting a van, or are just curious about this lifestyle, we’re here to help. In these pages you’ll find lots of Vanlife Australia inspiration, hints and tips, along with a list of products and details on converting your own van into a beautiful camper fit for living the vanlife.
Our Vanlife Story
We have always been nomads at heart. Even when we’ve settled down for a few years at a time, the call to wander is strong in our ears. In 2019 I (Sue) started researching for a year long trip to South America in 2021, which would coincide with my youngest son finishing school in 2020. All the adventurers I was watching on YouTube were living and travelling in their self-converted vans. I wanted a piece of this!
Vanlife looked like such a fun, cost-effective way to travel.
When 2020 rolled around, and overseas travel was halted, we changed our plans. We bought and built out our own van. We figured that at least we could travel Australia while international borders were closed. If we were lucky, maybe we could sell the van and make a profit on our investment.
What we didn’t expect was how we would fall in love with this lifestyle. Almost two and a half years after finishing the build, we are still living in the van and travelling Australia. We don’t have any plans to move out any time soon!
See the full story in this YouTube episode
Interested in Living the Van Life?
We had no experience when we decided to convert our van. We found a lot of information online and hope to help you with your DIY Van Build. Here’s a full list of the products we used in our van, and our Van Build video series.
Maybe you’re not confident in your own van building abilities and would prefer to buy a van that is already built out and ready for you to live the vanlife. There’s still a bit of a learning curve with this lifestyle. One of our biggest early lessons was becoming aware of our water consumption. Finding fresh water to fill our tank is still one of our weekly challenges.
We post regular updates to our Instagram page, not only about the places we visit in Australia, but particularly about vanlife reality – the great and the not-so-great!
We hope you will enjoy joining us on this journey.