Have you ever wondered whether your rent or mortgage payments could be better spent elsewhere? What if I told you that you could take a little trip around Australia in a van for far cheaper than living your regular-old city life?
I used to pay just under $500 a fortnight on rent whilst I was studying for my university degree. Worrying about electricity costs, water, Wi-Fi bills, and let’s not forget the biggest cost: food. Budgeting and spending under $1,500 a month on overall living, I often found myself asking, “surely there’s an alternative to all of this?”
Meanwhile, a good friend of mine was off exploring the endless beauty of Australia – embarking on an adventure of a lifetime to circumnavigate the country in his Toyota HiAce van.
I met Flynn Batterham hiking the hills of the Himalayas in early 2023 just after he was done finishing Year 12 exams. Quickly, I realised Flynn was a chief example of someone best described as ‘free-spirited’.
What amazed me after chatting to him was how cheaply he managed to do it. It really made me question why I’d been hustling so hard just to keep my head above water.
It was August 2023 when Flynn said goodbye to his Sydney life and headed north up the glorious east coast of Australia. The decision, however, didn’t come overnight.
“I spent six months after school building my van with my dad,” he said. “At the same time working ten-hour days, six days a week to save up for it.”
But once Flynn and his dad had remodelled the van’s interior to include a kitchen with a water tank, a solar-powered stove top, and interior lighting with a spacious double bed, the ongoing costs for his 18-month journey were far less than what I was paying to live.
“I generally spent about a grand a month,” he explained, which mainly consisted of petrol and food.
Flynn never rushed. It took him four months to get to Byron Bay. “Stopping at every single coastal town along the way,” he said.
Then he ventured into Far North Queensland for about five months before crossing the Northern Territory, turned down the west coast to Margaret River for two months, across the Nullarbor, and then eventually ‘home for a family dinner’.
It became evident that Flynn wasn’t simply on a big holiday, but rather he’d adopted an alternative lifestyle. One that included connecting with local communities, surfing, meditation, fire-spinning as well as finding odd jobs which included a timber yard in Byron, a marine tourism company in Port Douglas, and various construction companies too.
Amidst a cost-of-living crisis, it’s encouraging to know that people like Flynn have managed to not only survive but thrive on limited funds. If you ever feel that the stress of Sydney’s rat race is getting too much, just remember that there are always other options down the road.
