The showers at the Coffs Harbour Big4 were still emptying out when we slid the campervan door shut just after six. Something about leaving early on a coastal road feels less like a practical decision and more like a small act of defiance against the day’s predictable momentum — as if getting ahead of the sun means you might catch the place doing something it wouldn’t normally show you.
Byron Bay sat an hour and a bit north, and everybody we’d met in the preceding days had offered an opinion on it. “You’ll either love it or you’ll want to leave within an hour,” a woman at a servo near Port Macquarie had told us, filling her own van with diesel at the pump beside ours. “There’s no in-between.” She’d been a regular visitor for twenty years, she said, and she’d watched the town shift from a surfers’ stronghold into something that now sold $28 smoothie bowls to people who flew in specifically for them. She didn’t sound bitter about it. Just matter-of-fact.
The road from Coffs Harbour to Byron runs through a stretch of coast that doesn’t announce itself with dramatic cliffs or sweeping lookouts. It just gradually turns greener, the roadside vegetation thickening, the sky opening up until suddenly you’re crossing the Brunswick River and the town appears — low-slung, signposted not by a big entry sign but by a growing density of campervans and hire cars with roof racks.
We parked at the main beach car park just before eight, which meant we beat the worst of the mid-morning influx but had already lost the sunrise to people who’d been camped there overnight. Byron’s lighthouse walk is the obvious thing to do — the most easterly point of the Australian mainland, they keep telling you, as if geography alone justifies the foot traffic — and we joined the procession of walkers climbing the sealed path up the headland. The air smelled of sunscreen and salt and something floral from the coastal heath, and the wind was strong enough that conversation became optional.
What surprised us about the lighthouse wasn’t the view, which is genuinely good, or the whales we spotted breaching a few hundred metres out — it was the quiet that settled over the crowd at certain moments. A dozen strangers, standing in a line along the fence, all of them silent for maybe thirty seconds, watching the water. It felt less like a tourist moment and more like a collective pause that nobody had planned. Then someone’s phone rang and the spell broke, and we were back to selfies and sunscreen applications.
We spent the rest of the morning at a smaller beach around the headland — Wategos, where the surf was gentler and the crowd thinner. A guy in his sixties with a sun-bleached board under his arm walked past and offered a piece of advice unprompted: “If you’re gonna paddle out, take the rip on the southern side. It’ll save you the work.” We took his word for it and stayed on the sand, watching the waves break in long, lazy lines. A seagull tried to steal someone’s sandwich from a towel three metres away and succeeded. The victim — a woman in a wide-brimmed hat — just laughed and pulled another one from her bag.
By eleven, we were back in the van, heading north again. The Gold Coast was the next day’s destination, but we had the afternoon to fill, and we’d been told about a stretch of national park just south of the border that was worth a detour. We didn’t make it. A sign for a roadside fruit stand caught our attention — just a handwritten board nailed to a post — and we pulled over, and that was the afternoon gone. The woman running it, who introduced herself as Deb, had been selling mangoes and avocados and home-baked banana bread from that spot for eleven years. “I know every car that slows down before they even hit the brakes,” she said, handing us a bag of mangoes that she claimed were “the last good ones for the season, or something close to it.” We ate two of them sitting on a wooden bench behind her stall, juice running down our wrists, and we couldn’t tell if they were actually the best we’d had or if the setting was doing the work.
Day twelve began with the campervan’s air conditioner struggling against the humidity that hangs over the Gold Coast even in the morning. Surfers Paradise has a reputation for being the loud, brash cousin of the Queensland coast, and the first impression from the Esplanade confirms it — high-rises packed so tight they look like they’re leaning on each other, the beachfront dotted with hire umbrellas and groups of tourists moving in slow, overheated packs. We walked the length of the main strip, stopping at a cafe that served coffee that was fine but cost $6.50, and watched a man in board shorts trying to get a drone shot of himself standing on the sand. It took him four attempts and he never looked happy with the result.
But the Gold Coast has another side, and we found it by driving west into the hinterland. Lamington National Park is about forty minutes from the coast, and the transition is abrupt — the high-rises disappear in the rearview mirror, the road starts climbing, and suddenly you’re in rainforest that feels older and more serious than anything the coast offers. We parked at the O’Reilly’s day-use area and took one of the shorter walking tracks, a two-hour loop through Antarctic beech forest where the temperature dropped noticeably and the only sounds were bird calls and the creak of tree ferns moving in the breeze. A sign at the start of the track warned about leeches and advised wearing long pants. We hadn’t brought any, and we spent part of the walk checking our ankles every few minutes, which made the whole thing feel slightly ridiculous but also more alive.
Back on the coast in the late afternoon, we stopped at Burleigh Heads, a headland national park that feels like a compromise between the wildness of Lamington and the curated beachfront of Surfers Paradise. A walking track loops around the headland in about forty minutes, giving views back toward the high-rises and forward to the unbroken coastline stretching south. A local jogger passed us twice — she was doing laps — and on the second pass she pointed at a patch of water below and said, “Stingray. Big one.” We stood and watched it glide through the shallows, a dark shape moving with a patience that felt ancient and completely indifferent to the buildings behind it.
Day thirteen was Brisbane, and we arrived with the campervan’s diesel gauge reading just under a quarter tank and the city’s skyline appearing gradually through a haze of heat and distant construction cranes. Brisbane doesn’t make you work for its better moments the way Sydney does — it’s more straightforward, less inclined to hide its best views behind a toll road or a steep hill. We found a campsite on the south side of the river — the Brisbane Holiday Village, about fifteen minutes from the city centre — and set up under a gum tree that dropped leaves into our awning all afternoon.
South Bank was our first stop, and it’s the kind of precinct that feels designed to make visitors feel like they’ve made the right choice. The artificial beach, the walkways lined with fig trees, the wheel that dominates the skyline from certain angles — it’s deliberate, and it works. We walked the length of the riverfront, past the Nepalese Peace Pagoda and the markets setting up for the afternoon, and stopped at a food truck that sold fish tacos for $14 each. They were good — the fish was fresh, the slaw had a hint of lime — but the real pleasure was sitting on the grass and watching the city move around us. A group of office workers had claimed a patch of shade and were eating their lunches in silence, staring at the river. A toddler ran past, chased by a parent who was not quite keeping up. It felt lived in, not performed.
The Story Bridge at dusk is one of those experiences that travel writers love to describe as “iconic” or “unmissable,” and we’d read those descriptions enough times that we arrived skeptical. The bridge walk — the one where you climb the structure itself, harnessed in — costs more than we wanted to spend, so we watched from the riverbank instead, at the exact moment when the lights came on across the city and the bridge’s steel framework turned from grey to a warm amber. A group of kayakers paddled past underneath, their conversation carrying across the water. We couldn’t make out the words, but the tone was relaxed — that easy, unhurried quality that people’s voices take on when they’re not trying to get anywhere.
Brisbane’s urban camping scene is functional rather than charming — the Holiday Village had clean amenities and a small pool that was full of children until sundown, but the sites are close together and you hear your neighbours’ conversations whether you want to or not. A couple in the van next to us were on their way south after three months in Far North Queensland, and we traded notes over the picnic table. “The humidity up there will ruin a person,” the man said, shaking his head. “We got to the point where we were showering three times a day just to feel human.” His partner rolled her eyes and said it was twice, not three times, and they argued about it in a friendly way that suggested they’d had this conversation before.
Day fourteen was the end of the road. We returned the campervan to the depot in Brisbane’s northern suburbs — a process that involved a detailed inspection, a discussion about a small scratch on the rear bumper that we honestly hadn’t noticed, and a final bill that included a cleaning fee we probably could have avoided if we’d swept the sand out ourselves. The agent, a young woman named Camila who processed the paperwork with practiced efficiency, asked where we were headed next. “Home,” we said, and she nodded as if that was the most common answer she heard.
We had the rest of the day to fill before our flight, so we walked back into the city and found a cafe in the Botanic Gardens that served coffee in ceramic cups — no takeaway option — and sat there long enough that the staff probably wondered if we were going to order anything else. The gardens are not remarkable by Brisbane’s standards — they’re pleasant, well-maintained, full of people doing gentle exercise — but they felt like the right place to end. A magpie landed on the table next to ours and regarded us with the particular intensity that Australian birds reserve for people who might have food. We didn’t, and it moved on without apparent disappointment.
The walk back through the city took us past the Queen Street Mall, past a busker playing a didgeridoo with a backing track, past the line of people waiting for the ferry at Eagle Street Pier. A woman carrying a dry-cleaning bag and a takeaway coffee was talking on her phone about a meeting that had been rescheduled, her voice rising above the traffic noise. The city was doing what cities do — carrying on, indifferent to the fact that for us, this was the last afternoon of a trip that had started in Melbourne ten days earlier.
We checked our bags at the airport and found a seat by the window. The plane would take off heading east, then bank south, and from the air you’d see the river, the bridges, the coast fading into haze. None of it would look like a postcard from that height. It would look like a place where people live.
📷 Photos: Peter Gladwin (Unsplash), Peter Gladwin (Unsplash)
