Hitchhiking around Oz: is just a sleeping bag and foam mattress enough?

by Simon Akesson
(Perth, WA)

I plan to leave in one month and go hitchhiking all around Australia. (I'm a Swedish guy living in Perth at the moment.)

I plan to go south-east to start with, then follow the coast all around. I also want to do a trip to Alice Springs from Cairns and so on, nothing is set in stone. I'll just go wherever the road takes me.

Being a guy with quite a lot of previous hitchhiking experience I know it will happen that I get stuck in the middle of nowhere along the road and have to spend the night there. Just wondering, what you would recommend for this?

Back home a sleeping bag and foam mattress would do the trick, but in Australia you have dangerous mosquitoes, snakes, spiders and so on which could crawl into a open sleeping bag. But hitchhiking I wanna carry as little baggage as possible and those swags and some of the tents just look to big.

What would you recommend?

Response to: Hitchhiking around Oz—is just a sleeping bag and foam mattress enough?

Hi Simon,

I would get a small mosquito dome and a cover for it and then I'd probably never use it. But if you don't get it you will get stuck in some mosquito infested swamp and get rained on for days etc. Murphy's law...

In my experience a sleeping bag and foam mattress is enough on the road. I always managed. But you won't be on the road all the time, will you? I used to carry a little tent as well. I used it when I stopped in one place for longer, never when on the road.

Today I use a mosquito dome. They don't weigh much and I just hate having mosquitoes buzzing around my ears at night.

And if you get a fly for it, too, you have rain protection as well. Getting caught out in rain without a cover is the worst thing I can think of.

Don't worry about the snakes and spiders. That's nonsense.

If you can find something small and light weight, take it. If you don't, take your chances. That's how I'd approach it :-).