I’ve spent years writing about where to go and what to see once you’re there. What I hardly ever get to write about is the part I love most, which is the driving itself: the days when the driving is the point and your bed comes with you. So here are the two coastal campervan trips I’d fly across the world to do again, both of them facing the same ocean from opposite ends of it. One runs north out of Perth along Western Australia’s Coral Coast. The other runs out of Los Angeles, up the California coast one way and into the desert the other. If you’ve read my destination guides and wondered how you’d actually string those places together without a hotel every night, this is how I’d do it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The stretch north from Perth toward Ningaloo Reef is the drive that made me fall for Western Australia: empty highway, wildflowers in spring, turquoise water, and whale sharks you can snorkel with. I’d collect a campervan in Perth<\/a> for this one, because the distances up the Coral Coast are enormous and having your bed and kitchen travelling with you is the only sane way to do it. You’re looking at hundreds of miles between the places worth stopping, with long gaps where there’s no fuel and no hotel for hours, so a self-contained van is what makes the trip possible at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I use Travellers Autobarn, the budget campervan company, at the Perth end. They run a depot in Bellevue, about ten minutes from Perth airport, which makes it easy to land and point the van north the same day. That timing matters more than it sounds, because your first real target, Kalbarri, is a solid day’s drive up, and you don’t want to burn your first afternoon shuttling across the city.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Give yourself two weeks if you can, because Kalbarri, Shark Bay, Coral Bay and Exmouth each deserve a proper stop rather than a drive-by. Kalbarri gives you the gorges of the national park and that skywalk cantilevered out over the Murchison River. Shark Bay is where I’d slow right down: Monkey Mia for the dolphins in the shallows, and Shell Beach, made of billions of tiny white cockle shells packed metres deep instead of sand. Then Coral Bay, the quiet little sister to Exmouth, where you can wade off the beach and be on living reef within a few strokes. If you push all the way to Exmouth and time it for autumn, you can swim alongside whale sharks, which is the sort of morning you don’t stop thinking about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A word on the trade-offs, because I’d rather you knew going in. Spring, from roughly August to October, is the sweet spot: the wildflowers are out across the sandplains and the heat hasn’t arrived yet. Go in the depth of summer and the north gets brutally hot, with flies to match. Fuel and groceries cost noticeably more the further north you get, so I stock up in the bigger towns and never let the tank drop below half. And the driving days are genuinely long, so this suits people who like the road more than anyone hoping to be somewhere new every couple of hours.<\/p>\n\n\n\nLos Angeles, the Pacific Coast and the desert by RV<\/h2>\n\n\n\n