About us - TASMAN TRAVELS

Kia Ora! G’Day! Watcha and Hey!

Tom and Jordan here, a happy couple originally from Cambridgeshire, England. We absolutely love all things travel, camping and vanlife!

Currently living in the land of the long white cloud, Aotearoa New Zealand, we left the United Kingdom and the hustle and bustle back in 2017, after visiting Australia on a three week holiday in 2016 and absolutely falling in love!

Like many people we spent most of our time working, Tom in the Police and Jord in Property counting down the days to our next holiday, to our next day off, the weekend! And although we did enjoy the careers we had, most of time, something was missing, there had to be more to life than that, and there was, vanlife!!

Easy? Right…

No, it’s definitely not easy!

Although, within a year of first visiting the land of Aus, we were on the plane for our new life, there is a lot to think about and well, plan. You need to sell stuff, small things, big things, you need to store stuff, various parents garages, it takes time. And it’s hard, you don’t realise how attached you can become too silly little items, when really, they’ve been collecting dust for yonks!

By far the hardest part for us was leaving our family and friends! We are very close with our families and miss them everyday, but we keep in touch, FaceTime is an amazing thing, and they’re all very proud of us for taking the risk, for doing something different.

*Milford Sound/Piopiotahi, New Zealand/Aotearoa 2020*

We have now visited over 25 countries together, from Europe, South East Asia, and Australasia! Whilst in Australia, we bought our first campervan, a Ford Transit named Muriel, and toured a lot of the country over two years. Australia was epic, with vast distances and landscapes that never end.

This is where our love for vanlife began and we realised that this is a fantastic way to live long term. No rent, no bills and the freedom of waking up somewhere different every morning if we wanted! Living this way, our money went much further, and we picked up work on our travels, as and when we needed to.

After this, we moved to New Zealand, bought a Toyota Hiace camper, named Queenie and travelled the South Island, which is just spectacular. Not long afterwards we sold this van, and after saving hard whilst working at a holiday park, we bought our dream camper, a Mercedes Sprinter, named Matilda, and she was friggin’ awesome!

We make a fantastic team, and have really supportive whānau (family) in the UK and down under who helped us out along the way with advice, ideas and places to stay whilst in transition from houselife to vanlife. Of course there is a plenty of info online from various sources, websites and blogs like this one!

We decided it was time to share our journey on the road, to help give others inspiration, information and ideas on vanlife and travel.

After about a year of owning the Sprinter we decided yet again that we needed MORE space and so we sold her and purchased our first Caravan! It was all that was available at the time, so we took it, it served its purpose and we fell in love with caravans…. The new found ability to leave our home parked somewhere (often with one of us inside working) and still venture off in the ute or on the e-bikes was a complete game changer.

Fiordland National Park in our first caravan

Flip to today and we’re now owners of, (and Official Ambassadors for) Australis Caravans! This caravan has all the luxuries and extras to make life on the road as comfortable and wonderful as it can be. We couldn’t be happier to live in the Caravan of ours dreams and have the set up that we’ve always aspired for.

Do not be fooled in thinking it is all sunshine and plain sailing, we have experienced many ups and downs, and it takes a lot of adapting, and so we hope to share with you the great times, and the not so great times of our journeys. Be prepared for salty skin, sandy toes, and the unexpected.

Check out our rig & the gear we use here!