Meet the Aussies taking a gap year in their own backyard
When 24-year-old Liam and 24-year-old Ali finished up their “boring Commerce degrees in Melbourne”, they said they could have done one of three things.
Option 1: Use boring commerce degrees to get boring corporate jobs
Option 2: Drop pretty much all their savings on a trip around Europe for 2 or 3 months
Option 3: Buy a bus, kit it out, and explore their own country on the road
As tempting as Option 1 was, they went with Option 3.
Four months in, here’s what life looks like.
Ali and Liam – and Lauren, who you’ll meet later in this piece – are part of a fledgling movement: Australians who are ditching the overseas gap year for a life on the road, exploring their own backyard.
Tourism Research Australia (TRA), a Government body that keeps track of local tourism, has plenty of records about international backpackers doing a trip like this: between June 2016 and June 2017, there was over 645,000 international backpackers doing laps around the country, the highest amount in ten years.
But when Hack asked TRA how many young Australians were doing the same thing, the numbers were so small, they had to average the figures out over six years. They told us that on an average year in the last six years, there were only about 26,000 domestic trips (longer than 31 nights) taken by Australians under 24.
“There’s so many people hot footing overseas before seeing their own country first,” Ali told Hack, admitting that she had been one of those people too – when she traveled overseas for two years between school and uni.
“I felt like once I got overseas, the amount of people from foreign countries that knew more about my own country was ridiculous. You’d speak to people in Europe or America and they’d say, ‘Oh have you been to this place in Australia?’ and I literally couldn’t tell them anything.”
“We decided we could spend a year or maybe 2 years around Australia for the same cost as you could going to Europe,” Liam says.
So far, Ali and Liam’s trip has seen them make their way from Melbourne and all the way up to Cairns, with plans to make their way back down again – and then figure out the next leg from there. The goal is to do an entire “lap” of the country.
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