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Good morning everybody. I hope that you are well. My name is Christian and welcome to my channel Backpacking Bananas. Myself and my boyfriend Ben, hello, are on the biggest road trip of our entire lives. We are driving all the way from Perth, Western Australia to Sydney in New South Wales on the east coast of Australia. We're actually relocating there. So, we have a very full car and we've just spent our first two nights of the road trip in Dunsborough. And for the next couple of days, we are still in the Margaret River region. And that is what this vlog is going to be. Today, we're going to explore a winery. We're going to go into the town of Margaret River itself, and we are going to test
out our camping stuff for the first time in Australia. I don't think I've ever camped in Australia before, so that'll be fun. It's also a little bit chilly, so I am a little bit nervous and apprehensive about how this is going to go, but it's going to be fun. It's all part of the journey and I'm glad you're here. As I mentioned in the previous vlog, we kind of struggled with our itinerary with Margaret River because there is just so many places to visit here and we only had a few days. So, we decided that we were only going to visit one winery in the Margaret River region on this road trip. And the one we have chosen is one I've never been to before, but we got lots of recommendations for. It's
called Bass Felix, though. When you read it, I want to say Basset Felix, but my sister told me, she said it's Bas Felix. It looks so beautiful. Very nice. This one is 100% Shira. It's a dry wine, but tasting strawberry. So, it's a great way to start. I don't think I'd want this and the aspects that it has. I think I'd rather find that in a red wine. your feelings about it. That is a great opinion. I do appreciate it.
Have the 2023 Shard. You have to try Chardonnay. Not very. So, the tastings are $10, but that B is revoked if you just buy any of the bottles of wines. So, Ben's going to get the Cabernet Son, and I am going to get the 2024 K. Now taking a little stroll through the little town of Margaret River itself. We're not going to spend too long here, but I've heard that there is quite an infamous bakery, the Margaret River Bakery. So definitely going to get a little coffee from there. That looks so good. I couldn't resist getting a pie. So, we're now heading down to our campsite for the night in Hamlin Bay, but from what I read online, I don't think that we're going to have any phone
service there. And there's no Wi-Fi, no nothing. Uh, but we both had a little bit of work to do, a few emails to attend to. So, we literally just stopped off and parked in a little car parking bay in I can't remember the name of the little town that we were just in, but I'll put it on the screen. That's where we were just for the past 2 hours. Literally just hot spotting off our phones. And it's times like these where it's so important that you have data in the country that you are traveling in because we could not connect to Wi-Fi, but we really needed access to the internet. Now, to get access to the internet abroad, I have been using Saley Eims, and thank you so much, Sy, for being the kind sponsors of today's
video. It's really important to have data on the go so that you can do things like check where you're going on Google Maps, make bookings for future accommodation that you're going to stay in, do any research of the places that you're going to go. That's literally what we've been doing for the past couple of hours. And by far, my favorite way to get data abroad these days is with an eim. Because not only do you not have to fuff about with trying to find a local SIM, it also means that you can keep your home local SIM in your phone so that you can still receive text messages and phone calls. If you ever need to get a verification text, that's still going to come through, but you can
also access your local data. With SYL, you can choose however many gigabytes that you think you're going to need for your trip. And what sets SY apart from the other ESIM providers is that you only ever have to download your ESIM once. And then after that, you just top up the data that you need for whatever countries that you are going. So you don't need to fuff about with activating a new SIM for every single place that you go to. And so it means that when you need to buy data for a new country, it literally would takes you all of 20 seconds. I have a discount code for you where you can get 15% off all SY data plans. You just got to use my code backpacking or you can head straight to sail.com/backpacking.
The link for that will be in the description as well. Here we are. Okay, we have arrived. And now I just hope that we manage to do this without embarrassing ourselves. I feel like we've arrived somewhere which feels outside of my comfort zone. I feel like everyone here is a camper and knows what they're doing and we're like we've never even tried setting up our swag tent before. So here goes nothing. There's no instruction manual. I don't know if we open this. We need to pull. I think you just need to cut it. This is the mattress of the swag tent, by the way, that we cannot um get out of its packaging. Well, new job pumping up the
air mattress. Another item which we have not opened. How long did that take me? 5 minutes. Not too bad. Is this definitely where we want it? Okay, we've had a shocker. I went to the camp kitchen. The ladies there said none of the taps is drinking water. So if I want to actually drink this, which I do, I need to buy bottled water. Disaster in paradise. The store that like the reception is closed. So we can't buy water. We can't fill up water. We're on to an absolute shocker. We've only just arrived. What we do have is tonic water and a lot of jin. We're going to watch the sunset and then we are going to drive to a petrol
station and buy some water. It may be like 5 km or so. But look at our tent. At least we've done this successfully. Got a little mat here. We'll do the full setup later. But I'm pleased with that. How cute is she? I can't believe I so naively assumed that we would just be able to fill up with tap drinking water in Australia. How silly of me. Looks like it could be quite a nice sunset. A so beautiful. I must say it's very pongy here, though. Now, if you don't know, Hamlin Bay is actually famous for having stingrays that come right up to the shore. So, I wonder if you'll see any. I have been here before many years ago, and I do remember seeing them and kind
of like walking in amongst them, but don't remember where exactly on this beach it is. I'm a bit chilly, regretting not wearing my jumper. But I think we both needed this walk. Just take the edge off of the slight stress of trying to put the tent up, get the mattress out, and no drinking water. Later that same evening, I think we underestimated how much of a faf camping would be. Maybe we're going to get better at it. Maybe it's just because it's our first night that we're just like, what do we do? Oh my god, we've forgotten this. How do we set up this? I am so glad that I practiced setting up the compact camping chairs when I was at home the other day cuz it took me like
15 minutes to work it out. Whereas now I can do it in like 30 seconds and these are very comfortable. It was my first time setting up that camping table though. I wish I filmed it. There was a lot of frustration going on. I was like, "Oh god." And then in the end you learn as you go. Like you realize, oh, I should have done this. So, like hopefully the next time that we camp, which is actually going to be tomorrow night at a different campsite, everything will hopefully just run a lot smoother. Or maybe we're going to do all the same mistakes again. Maybe these things take time. It's a learning curve. I think this is good for us, right guys? This is character building. Ben's just gone to
the bathroom, but we've got some water boiling and we said that tonight we were just going to use up all the food that we already have. Something that we're trying to do is not buy food groceries when we don't need it. Like if we have enough food to make a meal, we want to work our way through that before buying new things. That is for the sake of our budget, but it's also for the sake of not carrying too much in the car. I think it's a good life skill to be able to do that as well. And today we have noodles. Quite a lot of it. And by noodles, I mean ramen. We're actually quite bougie with our plates. We got them from IKEA and they're proper plates and bowls because we thought that well then we can
have them and use them when we actually move to Sydney as opposed to just having camping bowls and plates which we're probably not going to use very much in the future. Seats so low for the table. A bit of a mishmash of your room. This is last night's pasta sauce mixed with ramen. And we also added three eggs. Welcome to our crib. The ceiling is right here. But it doesn't feel very cozy. We just feel like I can do nothing else rather than sleep. But that's fine because sleeping is all we are here to do. Obviously, we are higher up than what we should be because we
added in the extra air bed. But I'm kind of glad we did right now. At least right now I am because it's comfortable. We'll see how we go throughout the night. I don't know if I'll get too hot or too cold. I feel very good right now, but I have got many layers on. Let's make it through the night and I'll check back in with you in the morning. Early the next morning. Good morning. Do you know what? That was okay. I actually slept pretty well and so did Ben and it was like the perfect temperature. It wasn't too warm. It wasn't too cold. I took my fleece off and I took my trackies off, but I was
pretty comfortable in there. The air bed worked very well. I'm very impressed. It also like it kept it pretty dark. Like when the sun rose, it wasn't super bright in there like a usual tent. Well, what do you know? This is the toilet block. So there is showers Is your water bottle in there? Maybe it is. It's right there. So, what have we learned over the last 12 hours? I feel like this has been the point at which our patience uh with ourselves and with each other has been tested the most so far. I definitely regret not trying everything out before we arrived at the campsite. That feels like it should just be common knowledge, though. I feel just a bit silly the fact that we didn't do that
because that just like added a little bit of frustration just figuring things out whilst it was dark. And on the topic of that, I wish we arrived a little bit earlier at Hamlin Bay just so we had a little bit more time in the light to figure everything out because it took us longer than we would have expected. The car now is even more packed than it was before, which is not ideal because we can't exactly see through the middle anymore. And that's because the mattress of our swag tent, the one that's included, it was vacuum packed beforehand. And now when you're just rolling it up yourself, it's like four times the size, maybe even five times the size. It's probably the biggest thing in our boot right now, even bigger
than the tent itself. And so we're thinking that we might throw it away or give it away or donate it just because as you know we are also sleeping on our air bed and so I don't think we necessarily need the mattress underneath and if it's taking up that much space. It's probably something that we can say goodbye to. I reckon we are camping again at a holiday park in Albany tonight. So, it will be interesting to see if we feel a little bit calmer about our setup tonight and if things go any smoother or if we realize that we've still got a lot of lessons to learn. I love just like how Australian this looks.
It is cold in Peton, but we've got ourselves our coffees. We've come into a cafe called Just Lofty in Peton, which had pretty good Google reviews. Fortunately, they don't have any wifi, but my 4G is working on my phone, so I can hotspot to my laptops. Green's pool is over there. I'm keen to go to Elephant Rocks. This is such a good swimming spot near Denmark. So, on the way to Albany, so I really, really wanted to go here. I've been here before and I wanted to take Ben here, but it's so cold. So, I don't
think that we're going to be swimming. At least we'll go have a little walk down. It's a little break in the driving, go see the beautiful blue water, and then we'll be heading back on our way. And these are the elephant rocks. And the water around here is just stunning. I remember swimming in this last time, but the reason they're called the elephant rocks is because they kind of look like the backs of elephants. Kind of if you squint. We just made a quick stop in the town of Hay at the Boston Brewing Co. because a girl named Emma messaged me and told me that she worked there and it was so nice. We had a little cider and she said if there are
any chefs looking for a job, definitely go apply at the Boston Brewing Co. because they have positions available. But we got this gorgeous bottle of rosé to take with us, which we will probably have tonight at the campsite to make us feel better about the fact that we are doing another night of camping. All right, it's day two and we have perfected this. Look how cozy that looks. I'm so proud of us. And we did that so quickly. It did just take one night. It took one night of trial and error and now we know what we're doing.
This is great. We are staying at the Acclaim Albany Holiday Park tonight. It's costing us for $53 for the night. And that is in a powered site. Not that we wanted a powered site. We don't need that. But that was all that they had available. And actually, every single other campsite in town was completely fully booked tonight. So, this wasn't necessarily our first choice. However, first impressions of being here, it's actually very nice. The staff on reception were very, very pleasant. It was very, very easy to find our spot. The toilets fine. Showers look okay. I think we'll be fine here. We're only here for the night. It's in a Works bag, but we just did an Aldi shop for some
sustenance for dinner and for lunch tomorrow. Ideally, we want to start cooking before the sun sets. I'm feeling tipsy from that side. Do I temporar? I feel really good. Ideally, we would have had our setup next to our tent, but the wind is coming from this direction, so we've used our car as a bit of a wind break.
Stunning. So, tonight we've just gone for a vegetable treat. So, fried rice with eggs in it as well. And here we've got wine from the Boston Brewery. The next morning. Good morning. This morning we have come to beautiful Middleton Beach in Albany. one because it's just another area of Albany to check out before we leave, but also uh there's a park run that leaves from here and it is Saturday morning and I want to do it. So, we're here at 7:30 in the morning. Going to get a little cough and I'm going to do a little run.
Oh, I'm happy with that. I completed that in 28 minutes 35 something like this. What was my average place? Well, my average heart rate was 176 unsurprisingly. It was so hilly. It was undulating as they say. So, it kind of went up out down up down. It was definitely the most beautiful park run I've ever done though. The most hilly and the most beautiful. And I'm particularly happy with that pace cuz I even walked for a bit of it. Some of the hills when towards the end when they were just really steep, I was like, you know what? This is This needs to be walked. This is too much. Okay, the car is packed up again. We are leaving Albany and our next stop is going to be Espiran. So, we have a 5hour journey ahead of us. So, I'm going to
end the vlog here. I really hope you guys enjoyed this video. Subscribe if you want to keep up to date with our road trip across the country. Make sure you secure your spot on the Austria ski trip if you want to join me there in January. That's all from me and I will see you in the next video. Bye-bye.
