Podcast #20 – Living out of a backpack in Australia for a year

If you plan on going on a serious backpacking trip to Australia, this episode is for you.

Oliver and I met in 2016 whilst we were backpacking up the East Coast of Australia. We quickly became good friends when we were learning to surf during a bootcamp-style week of riding the waves.

After traveling in a group all the way up to Brisbane, we went our separate ways. Oliver has the best stories of that little era, as he went into the desert to work on a melon farm. The outback is filled with colorful characters, and the hilarious stories shared in this episode reflect just that.

After traveling through the Whitsundays and all the way up to Cairns, Oliver moved down to South Australia to work on an orange farm, which was a different, but equally interesting experience. After that, he went West to work at a dolphin sanctuary. All in all, there are many good travel tales in this episode with one of my favorite people from the United Kingdom.

The show

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Episode contents

00:04:20 – A wild arrival in Australia & the drinking culture
00:18:10 – Surfing bootcamp
00:31:50 – Melon-picking in the middle of the desert
00:40:50 – People losing their minds in the desert & getting into trouble with the law
00:55:45 – Orange picking in South Australia
01:09:05 – Dolphins and crocodiles on the West Coast
01:21:00 – Ways to travel
01:50:18 – Working on a dog farm and hunting wild boars
02:05:25 – Australia is fantastic
02:14:00 – Beauty of nature in New Zealand and Australia

Clips & links

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Recording details

Recorded on April 21, 2019; in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.