What is the average cost of travelling around Oz?

by Lisa

Planning on travelling around Oz with my partner in Campervan (so no need for hostels etc.)

We were wondering how long we could travel on $10,000 Aussie dollars (excluding car cost), we would be fairly cost conservative. Has anyone else done this? What kind of money did you spend over what period of time?

Thanks! :)

Response to: What is the average cost of travelling around Oz?

Hi Lisa,

I have done a lot of that kind of thing, and I'd say $10.000 will go a looong way.

Your single biggest expense will be fuel costs. The rest just about pales to insignificance next to that...

So when you say excluding car costs, are you excluding fuel costs?

Costs for fuel vary wildly across the Australian states. The NT and WA are the most ridiculously expensive. On top of that prices shoot up as soon as you leave the populated coastal areas anywhere.

So what any stage of the trip costs you depends where you are...

The length of your trip won't be limited by the amount of time that your money lasts, but by the amount of kilometres you can buy. The slower you are moving on from one place to the next, the longer your money will last, know what I mean?

If you want to save money on camping check out Jan Holland's camping guide books. I wouldn't leave home without them. With that your camping costs across half of Australia are down to nearly zero.

You probably know what you usually spend on groceries, and a few national park entry fees here and there are not the world. Fuel, that's the only real expense.

Having said all that, I have no idea how you'd go over on the east coast, and what costs you are looking at there. I guess the free bushcamping sites would be a bit harder to come by. (But the diesel is cheaper :-) )

Comments for What is the average cost of travelling around Oz?

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Where do we start?
by: Stacey

Me and my friend Emma are going to travel a bit of Australia, were thinking New South Wales. We would like to stay on a ranch where we could learn skills and perhaps work a little. We'd like to also attend surfing lessons, maybe do the obvious things like whale watching and visit national parks. Were looking to go mid year this year for maybe anything between 3 weeks and 3 months, how much money at least do you think we will need?

I can't help with that
by: Birgit

Hi Stacey, I'm sorry but I would have no idea. Surfing lessons, whale watching, New South Wales national parks... That has nothing to do with the Outback.

I'm afraid I can't say what any and every activity on the whole huge continent might cost. Maybe some readers have experience in that area and can help out with that?

Family traveller
by: matthew

We have just come back from 9 weeks around half of oz. The cost was about 10,000. This was with a family of five so nothing is cheap. Get all the camping books you can this will save you. We didn't do much of this until after Darwin. I should let you know our trip started in Melbourne to Alice Springs, Darwin. Then we came back to Three roads across to Brisbane, up to Frazier Island then slowly down to Sydney. From there we came home. This was the best trip for us as a family we got close together, and learnt a lot. There are a lot of things to see, we would do this trip again but there is more of oz we want to explore.

Should get you around 1/3 of OZ
by: Smith

My wife and I traveled around Oz back in 06-07 for 12 months. We had a diesel land cruiser and hard floor camper trailer. As noted earlier the biggest cost will be fuel, then matched between food and accommodation. Of course the more free camps you do the more you'll save but for us there were a lot of places that we wanted to see closer to towns and therefore we opted to pay for caravan park accommodation. When we set out we thought we could easily spend half our time bush camping in an effort to save $$$, but in reality it was far less.

Well worth the effort to plan and the dollars spent. Would take off tomorrow if we could.

camper
by: Anonymous

First of all be safe and have fun girls

All up for the two of you covering food, car and fuel, sites and entry to parks, the odd motel and few unexpected extras along the way for 3 months I would take 5-6k as minimum and you can always have a few dollars for when you're back.

Stick together, watch each other's back and if you do drink in company either at a local pub or where ever you may find yourself be very careful of your drinks and food.

happy adventures

One piece of advice for the site owners/moderators
by: Michael

It would be a REALLY good idea if you were able to turn on time/date stamping for comments.

Why?

Well, the article I'm responding to concerns the approx. cost of travelling around parts of Australia.

The problem?

There is no way to establish time/date context. So, if someone says "it cost me $10,000 to travel over this route", it really means nothing, as they may have travelled in 2001, or 2010, or 2017... there's no way to know (and hence no way for a reader to judge if the costs would reflect someone looking to travel today).

Just a thought...

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