Australia is a huge country, with a very, very long coastline (nearly 36,000km in fact) It’s also extremely beautiful, and varied – as you’d expect across that distance – and it just seems to be sitting there on a map, asking you to drive around it. Luke Bakhuizen, a digital content creator and social media influencer is doing exactly that, planning a journey to circumnavigate the vast country. We sat down with him to discuss his plans for this once in a lifetime adventure.
Q: Tell us about your trip?
Travelling Australia is something I have always wanted to do. I have a passion for off-road adventures and spending time in less traveled areas, Australia has some of the remotest areas on the planet and I am so excited to discover these places! The trip with be done with a close friend and my trusty Land Rover.
Q: What are your plans along the way?
Travelling with an open-ended plan. (Or maybe that’s not a plan at all!) I’d love to just keep going around, stopping when I want to, and staying as long as I want. I plan to capture content of Australia with drone and paraglider to create short films and photographs that really show the world what a beautiful country Australia is and what it has to offer. There is bound to be plenty of challenges along the way and I would like to document everything as we travel.
Q: Where will you visit?
Plan is to depart Sydney before the wet season arrives up north and travel to Brisbane then onto Cairns, Cape York, Darwin, Perth, Melbourne, Uluru and return to Sydney. Highway 1 is the longest national highway on the planet.
It’s a combination of roads including major motorways such as the Princes Highway, Eyre Highway, Great Northern Highway, Stuart Highway, Bruce Highway and Pacific Highway to name but a few but I’d like to travel off the main highways and explore more of the country side, seeing pretty much everything.
I mean, most towns, most tourist spots, most of the national parks. Obviously, Australia is huge, and you can’t see it all, but because it’s also very sparsely populated it’s not that difficult to cover the best bits!
Q: What excites you most about the trip
Being away from civilization and present in every moment, seeing breathtaking sunsets over the oceans and exploring places that very few have been privileged enough to see, it’s really a once in a lifetime adventure!
Q: What time of the year will you go?
The ‘top end’ or extreme north experiences tropical weather which is referred to as the ‘Wet Season’ and the ‘Dry Season’. The tropical wet season coincides with the southern summer and high temperatures, extreme humidity and massive rainfall are the norm.
Roads and bridges can become impassable with flooding and towns and communities become landlocked so yeah, I plan to depart Sydney after the wet season up north ends in April and have an “endless summer” around Australia.
The journey around Australia is not for the meek and if you haven’t yet mustered up the courage to do a trip of such epic proportions yourself, there is always the opportunity to live the adventure vicariously through the eyes of Luke Bakhuizen – If this article sparked your interest, follow Bakhuizen’s journey around Australia via his social channels:
