I tried TikTok's viral 'car camping' trend. It was kind of disgusting

TikTok told me being poor is "the new rich." It isn't.

Car camping may be a nice Instagram brag, but for me it would have been cheaper to stick to Airbnb.

'SUV life' looks like the perfect cheapskate escape.

According to TikTok, it's all fairy lights, Moka pots and sexily filtered campsites (in case you've been living under a rock, Hipcamp is the new Airbnb).

According to the New York Times, living out of a motor vehicle is a "lush" and "booming" trend making all sorts of camping-adjacent businesses rub their wallets with glee. Those flapping curtains, wood panelled furnishings and panoramic views don't pay for themselves.

But before you pop onto Gumtree and buy the first clapped out Subaru Forester you come across, there are a few things you need to know before hitting the cupboard-rattling road. Here are the truths about the 'home is where you park it' lifestyle you need to be savvy to.

The best spots are usually illegal to park overnight in

You know those beautiful 'today's office' shots? Yeah, you probably can't park there overnight.

In my experience (and, admittedly, I haven't yet been beyond Australia's East Coast), all the coolest "can't believe you slept here" shots are a fantasy. If you want to wake up somewhere with a nice view, like a beach carpark, you'll probably have to either sleep around the corner and move there at 5am, or sleep there all night and risk the rangers. 

It can test your relationship 

@sightsofsara

we began our trip! here’s how we are staying comfy on the road @Trtl Travel #vanlife #roadtrip ad #adventure #outdoors #travel #hiking #tinyhome

♬ Life Goes On - Oliver Tree

I'm not going to lie. I was taken in by the trending 'SUV camping' videos on TikTok during lockdown. Hard. Seeing glamourous travel influencers showing off how they "did my hair in the desert" and travelling across America by sleeping in Walmarts, I was hooked. If the TikTok couples could do it indefinitely, and even be as bold as to claim it's "the new rich," surely my girlfriend and I could manage a weekend in the back of our car? How wrong I was. 

Although we enjoyed a couple of weekend trips living out of the car, my poor DIY skills led to a number of testing scenarios (like having the police called on us as we loudly struggled to set the bed up outside someone's house at 11pm at night).

Car camping looks like the perfect escape from reality. But it comes with a few realities of its own. Image: supplied.

Our lack of organisation (and our apartment's leaky storage cage) also meant that after investing about $600 in materials to build a bed in the back of our car, we will probably never car camp again, seeing as everything has now gone mouldy. In fact, given we only used it about 4-5 times, it would probably have worked out cheaper (and easier) to just get an Airbnb.

It's not as cheap as you think

I have a friend who sheepishly admitted to spending $60,000 or so on his trip around Australia. Granted, this friend is quite high maintenance, partial to nice restaurants, reluctant to camp illegally (always paying for campsites) and works in finance. But still: if you're not good at living on a shoestring now, just because you move into a car or van you won't magically become good at budgeting (or cooking).

Also, even if you are a fan of slumming it, sleeping in a car is way more conspicuous than sleeping in a van. So expect your free-camping exploits to be stressful and occasionally interrupted with a knock on the window from a ranger. 

You don't automatically become spiritually enlightened 

You do, however, become a pro at using petrol station toilets, and surfboards as curtains. 

You don't always feel welcome

Not every town is easy to find an overnight park in.

This is something you notice, especially when you move your life to the road full time. As another friend, Tas Fielding from @saltywanderers, told me, when you are travelling full time, "There are some places where you don’t feel welcome... That is something that no one ever mentions."

You need to get used to early dinners... especially if you want to fly under the radar of cop-calling 'Karens'

Even on my weekend car camping trips, I noticed this. But, as Mr Fielding explains, it's something you really have to get used to when you move your whole life into a van. He told Escape: "We have learnt that you need to organise your time better to do normal tasks when living in a van."

"For example, cooking and cleaning take so much longer without a proper kitchen, and a lot of the time you want to be cleaned up and inside your van before dusk." So if you want to commit to a life of living in your SUV (or out of a van), get ready to be a kind of nomadic Cinderella...

Going to the toilet can be tricky

"The toilet and shower is a big issue if you don’t have a bathroom inside of your van," Mr Fielding told Escape. "It can get very tricky with finding public toilets."

No matter how hard you try, Internet and power will be an issue

 

 

 

 

 

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A post shared by Salty Wanderers (@saltywanderersau)

According to Salty Wanderers, "Internet and power are your best friends and worst friends when you are on the road... but unfortunately, you will have many issues with these two in the most important moments." And they speak from experience, having recently just had to buy a third solar panel (the first wasn't powerful enough, so they sold it, and the second one fell off their roof).

The cost of staying in camp sites adds up 

If you're not stealthily pulling your handbrake in suburban streets, or fanging your four wheel drive over the gigantic cliffs of the Great Australian Bite, then you'll be staying in campsites. And it's a bit of a rort. Even the "free" ones generally cost at least $6, and require a booking, and if you want to go somewhere popular, like Jervis Bay, if you don't book a fair way in advance there probably won't be any spots left.

This leaves you with two options: going back to sneakily kipping on the side of the road, or using an app like Hipcamp, where you pay anywhere between $40 and $100 per night (from my experience) to park up on someone's farm (with no facilities, but sometimes a river).

Wellness is expensive

I don't know if it's inflation, the Tiny House Movement or whether we simply value a small patch of dirt more now than we did 10 years ago... but for some reason, even though camping used to be a hated, laughable, geeky, school camp-y thing less than 10 years ago, it's now a luxury lifestyle aspiration (and often priced to match).

Having an awning is more stressful than not having one 

Enjoying a rare moment of unstress under the awning in Greenpatch, Jervis Bay. Image: supplied.

I thought buying a $400 awning would be a great idea. But there were problems. So many problems. The first one was getting it on the car. I had no tools or skills, so it sat under my sofa for 6 months. Then I bought a $150 drill from Bunnings, put some sleeping earplugs in my ears, donned a pair of swimming goggles, and tried to put it on in the middle of the street. After half an hour of getting nowhere (and quite a few weird looks) I gave up. A friend then came around a few days later and said: "You know you have this drill in reverse..."

Long story short, I eventually paid a family friend to put it on for me, and now worry for it like a newborn baby every time I use it, fearing that if I leave it up all night the wind (or pools of water forming in the middle of it from rain) will warp it, and wincing every time I hear a gust. I'm also now reluctant to sell my car, even though it costs me a stupid amount of money to keep it on the road, simply because I went to so much effort to get the awning on (the awning is probably worth more than the car at this point).

And all that to enjoy an hour of shade, and maybe two hour's protection from the rain, in the year and a half I've owned it...

Car camping makes you more liable to spend money on fancy dinners and takeaway breakfasts...

... undermining the whole point of your frugal lifestyle in the process. But my god does that avocado on toast with chili flakes and NO dukkah (it's just a bit too much, if you ask me) taste good when you know you've paid nothing for accommodation.

Car camping makes demolishing a bottle of wine on the beach stressful

"You're driving, right?"

Even if you're not driving anywhere afterward, when you're car camping you still often need a designated driver to move your vehicle around the corner to wherever you plan on sleeping at the end of the night, away from whatever "nice view" destination you set up at during the day. 

Car camping will make you an RSL connoisseur 

Why shiver under your battered awning when the Rabbitohs are playing the Roosters and there's VB on tap nearby? Oh, and when you're staying somewhere a bit more remote than a coastal carpark, you need to be careful with water (as I found out four salty Margaritas deep, on a recent trip, as I realised we had just used all our drinking water to wash up with, and had 10 parched hours ahead of us before we could drive to the supermarket in the morning).

You start getting judgemental of vans

If it's this messy after less than 24 hours (guilty), imagine what it would look like after a week?

Look at them with all their sinks, fridges and headroom. Hah! Never mind you are living in a cramped hell hole - you're building character... Oh and as an aside: always bring a tent, just in case you feel the need to get the hell out of your SUV.

You feel like an astronaut

One of the observations about urban camping that I've read that has stuck with me most comes from journalist Antonio Armano, who told Vice: "At the end of the experience, I felt like an astronaut returning from space. It took me a while to get used to life indoors." He also said that he stayed in certain parts of Italy where people were suspicious of people who lived out of their vehicles. 

Not that I've spent as much time car camping or van life-ing as some people, but even in my limited experience, I have noticed that - though you meet some amazing, kind people along the way - probably because of the lazy or rude actions of a very small minority of van lifers, this entire genre of travellers has been given a bad reputation among locals in small towns, and in the media. So that's just something you have to deal with - being pre-judged for your lifestyle choice (and hopefully proving the misconceptions wrong).

You don't spend as much time 'travelling' as you might think

Mr Armano also told Vice: "The biggest myth is that you get to travel a lot. Sometimes, you find a nice spot and you want to enjoy it. It’s also hard to find places to fill up your water tank and discharge your sewage, and when you do, you tend to stop and chill for a while."

Originally published as I tried TikTok's viral 'car camping' trend. It was kind of disgusting