Anyone planning a first road trip tends to ask the same thing: is the view worth driving for days to reach it? After a decade of chasing coastlines and mountain passes from a camper, my answer keeps coming back to a handful of drives that earn every kilometre. Below are the questions travellers email me most, along with the routes that prompted them.
How do people decide where to start a campervan trip?
Most travellers start with a flight, then build the drive around wherever they land. That single decision shapes the whole trip. Land in tropical Far North Queensland and you wake up to rainforest meeting reef. Fly into the US west coast instead and one of the planet’s great coast roads waits outside the airport.
If reef and rainforest sound like the right opening, hiring a campervan in Cairns puts you within an hour of the Captain Cook Highway, which threads north toward Port Douglas and the Daintree. The road hugs the water and climbs over headlands before dropping back to beaches where you can pull over for a swim before lunch. Few drives pack that much scenery into so little distance.
For the American version, renting an RV in Los Angeles drops you at the southern end of the Pacific Coast Highway. Point the van north and Big Sur and Monterey roll out over a few unhurried days, with cliffs falling to the ocean the whole way. Plenty of people fly in, collect the keys and are parked above the surf at Malibu by afternoon.
What makes a route scenic, not just long?
A long drive and a beautiful one are not the same animal. The routes that stay with you change character as you go. The Great Ocean Road in Victoria does this well, opening with surf beaches near Torquay before the Twelve Apostles rise out of the sea further west. You feel the landscape shifting under the wheels rather than scrolling past the same paddock for hours.
New Zealand’s South Island works on the same principle. Drive from Queenstown to Milford Sound and you pass through farmland and beech forest, then a tunnel cut through the mountains before the fiord appears. Three hours of driving, four or five distinct worlds. That density of change is what separates a memorable route from a slog.
How much time do these drives take?
This trips up a lot of first-timers. Maps make the Pacific Coast Highway look like a day trip; the reality is closer to four or five days if you want to stop where stopping is the whole point. The Great Ocean Road can be rushed in a day, though two lets you walk the rainforest at Great Otway and catch the Apostles at sunset without sprinting.
A rough guide I share with friends: take whatever the map suggests and roughly double it. Scenic roads are slow by design, full of pull-offs and lookouts that you booked the trip to see. Treating the driving as filler between campsites misses the whole idea.
Do you need a big vehicle or will a small camper do?
Smaller than you think, usually. On twisting coast roads, a compact campervan is easier to park at crowded lookouts and friendlier on fuel. Couples and solo travellers rarely regret going small. Larger RVs make more sense for families, or for routes with long highway stretches and well-spaced campgrounds like parts of the American Southwest.
Match the van to the road, not to the photo you saw online. A right-sized camper on the Captain Cook Highway beats a living-room-on-wheels you are afraid to reverse.
Which route should a first-timer pick?
If you want short distances and constant payoff, Far North Queensland is hard to beat: rainforest and reef within a couple of hours’ driving. For a longer coastal epic with big mileage and bigger views, the Pacific Coast Highway out of California is the one people picture when they imagine the open road.
Neither needs special skills. Both reward a relaxed pace and a willingness to pull over the moment something catches your eye. The best campervan routes are not a race to a viewpoint. They are the rare kind of trip where the windscreen is the attraction.
