The Road Trip Of A Lifetime

The One Pack Wanderers have conquered Australia and Mazda came along for the ride.

Australians love utes. Celebrated as an Aussie invention, the ute ranks among the country’s best-selling new cars.

Besides carrying a huge amount of stuff with ease, they’re built to make light work of rough terrain. They’re also suited to towing and touring, which is why adventurers love them.

Globe-trotting couple Tia and Cheveyo – also known as the One Pack Wanderers – are a perfect example. This adventurous duo arrived in Perth in 2023 with the goal of exploring Australia. When they realised they needed more than public transport, they did what every outback adventurer does and bought a… Mazda3.

That’s right. These global tourists, who began their full-time world travels in July 2021, chose a 2005 edition of Mazda’s popular small sedan, a car they nicknamed ‘Blueberry’, for a trip of a lifetime through Australia.

Their 28,000-kilometre journey saw Blueberry take them to the other side of the country, from Melbourne up along the east coast to Sydney, then Brisbane and Far North Queensland, and then across to Darwin and the tropical north.

An unexpected weather event in the north of Western Australia then sent them on the world’s longest detour. They drove back to Perth via the centre of the country on a road trip they ultimately described as ‘unfinished’.

Tickets in hand, they sold Blueberry to a local family and departed Perth for their next country.

For Tia and Cheveyo, the need to complete their ‘Big Lap’ was an itch they needed to scratch, and that’s when Mazda got in touch.

Landing back in Australia, ‘Luna’, a silver BT-50 XTR-LE, became the couple’s next Mazda for their Australian discoveries. 

Luna powered Tia and Cheveyo through an array of adventures before the couple signed off their Aussie trip with a return to a Mazda3. This time it was a 2024 hatch they named ‘Bella’, a fitting bookend to their original adventures with Blueberry. As Tia said, it was “the perfect ending to our Big Lap story in Australia.”

Tia and Cheveyo’s Australian road trip was more than a holiday. It was a reminder that simple happiness comes from three essentials in life: the emotion of motion, the excitement of youthful independence, and the purity of connection.

Watch their video below.