Island Life Realities: 7 Surprises That Hit Me After Moving to Paradise

Last year in August, I moved together with my little family to an island in Queensland. I am Austrian, and this was always a dream of mine. Over the last few years, we spent most of our time in Europe, living in the Netherlands and Austria. Lately, Travis, my husband, and I thought it was about time for a drastic change and to escape the awfully cold weather that these countries experience for at least 6 to 9 months.

While we were in Sydney last May, we had no idea where we wanted to go, so we started by camping for a couple of weeks and drove with our camper trailer through Australia.

Camping wasn’t a long-term solution, so we came up with a better idea.

While living in Sydney for a few months, we started looking more into going off-grid. It’s a crazy world, and this step made a lot of sense to us. Relatively quickly, we found a very nice house for rent on an island in Queensland. It looked perfect. With a garden of about 500m² and our own veggie garden, we could taste how it would be to set up an off-grid lifestyle.

We were thrilled in the beginning, but soon our minds changed due to things that we didn’t see coming at all. — Travis.

1. The Island Weather

A few weeks ago, you might have heard about Cyclone Jasper, which was moving along the east coast of Australia in Queensland. We had no idea how bad it would be, but we experienced some uneasy nights with heavy rain and strong winds.

Luckily, we didn’t have any damage, but the internet was out for a couple of days, and some of our neighbours experienced power outages. Some trees had to be cleaned up from the streets, but luckily, nothing else. However, we were only fortunate! This could have gone very wrong, as you could see on the news. Some other towns were not as lucky and had to deal with a lot of flooding after the cyclone hit.

The weather here is wilder than I expected. Living on this island means dealing with power outages at least every month during summer, and the same goes for the WIFI/Internet connection.

2. Nature

Have you ever experienced not being able to go outside without 10–20 mosquitos attacking you all at once?

It is not the most pleasant experience.

Mosquitoes pose a significant challenge here. Although helicopters are occasionally seen spraying against them, the issue persists. The issue gets worse because there isn’t much wind on this island, which is shielded by the surrounding islands.

If the mosquitos don’t get you, the midgies here will for sure. You can barely see them until they have bitten you. The bite doesn't hurt that much but the itchiness that you experience later might cost you some hours of your sleep.

One of the most frightening things are venomous snakes, especially with having small children that are at the age of wanting to touch everything. A neighbour told us the other day that he spotted a Red-bellied Black Snake, just one house away from ours. Not so comforting I must say.

On the bright side, there are also some kangaroos and koalas somewhere, but we weren’t lucky enough to see any yet. I love kangaroos and koalas. I also love the birds here; everything reminds me a bit of Jurassic Park. One of my best moments on the island was feeding wild cockatoos in our own garden. It was truly amazing, and the bird ate out of my hand so gently, so softly, so kindly; it was fascinating. Cockatoos are unbelievably intelligent and very cute.

The other day, someone posted a picture of a crocodile near the main beach, but it might have been fake, as there shouldn’t be crocodiles in this area. However, with the weather changing, it might actually be a possibility.

3. The Ferry Service

When we researched the island and saw that they just renovated the wharf for the ferry, I was quite happy. As you know now, the weather on the island is not always smooth, and when it is too stormy or foggy, the ferry doesn’t operate. There is no bridge connecting the island to the mainland, so you are completely stuck on the island unless you have your own boat, which you probably should not use during a cyclone or similar event either.

You might be stuck for days.

By the way, taking the ferry to the mainland takes about 1.5 hours. If you want to take your car, you will have to make a reservation about 2 weeks in advance and pay about $70 for one ride, depending on the size of your car. If you go without your car, you are stuck in the middle of nowhere, waiting for the bus to come.

4. Supermarket

When the weather is bad, the internet is out of order, you have power outages and no new deliveries can come to the island, the only local supermarket on the island has a big problem too.

Some shelves stay empty for quite some time; some of the products have already long passed their use-by date. Some aisles in the supermarket might be pitch black because there is something wrong with the electricity, and nobody comes to fix it for days. Bread, milk, and eggs are the first things that run out, closely followed by everything that is fresh — veggies, fruit; everything is empty.

Until new deliveries come in, these shelves stay empty.

I experienced Covid with some empty shelves; I just didn’t expect it to happen so regularly here on the island.

5. Deliveries

After getting so used to ordering groceries and food online in all the places we’ve ever lived, it was a real shock to us when we realized that there wasn’t any kind of delivery service on the island. We could no longer have a lazy day and order some Thai or pizza. Instead, we had to rely on buying everything in-store and preparing it ourselves. We both love cooking, especially Travis, but on some days, it is nice to take a break from being the kitchen chef.

Moreover, in many cases, while Amazon or other online deliveries were possible, larger items would frequently not ship to the island, and even when they did, the delivery time was considerably longer.

For instance, we ordered a new washing machine from Kmart in early November. Despite making several calls to customer service, each time being assured it would arrive soon, it’s now the end of January 2024, and we’re still waiting. To our surprise, when we called again, the lady at customer service mentioned it somehow vanished but they forgot to notify us. We ended up cancelling the order completely. It turned out to be a blessing in disguise, considering we ordered it when we thought of staying longer. I’ve adapted to handwashing everything, at least for now.

6. Activities for Kids

The island we live on doesn’t have much to offer for young kids or teenagers. I plan to let my kids experience as much as they want, such as surf courses, art courses, sports courses, dance courses, singing courses — you get the idea. The people on the island don’t have a high monthly budget to spend, so it’s not a good market to offer these things. Most of the people on the island are retirees who enjoy their relaxed life there. However, for kids, I think it can be boring in the long term.

7. Living in a House

Last but not least, we rented a really sweet house, right? Wrong!

After having to deal with all the garden work here, Travis and I had to admit to ourselves that we enjoy other things more.

Garden work is not our favourite, we prefer going out on a trip, a new adventure, rather than spending time in the garden that we also have to take care of.

Our kids have stopped using the garden much because we have fire ants all over it, and it is hard to get rid of them. Two different kinds of ants are also in our house; they don’t hurt much but also sting. I tried everything to get them out of the house, but they always seem to find new ways, quite quickly, and some of these ants find their way to my favourite dark brown couch on which I love writing my articles, some of them found their way to my jar of honey in the kitchen cabinet. Very sneaky little creatures. lol

It was a great experience to live on an island; we had beautiful moments in the sunlight, with lovely birds around us, and faced intense weather conditions. Often, we would just lie in our house in the dark and watch the lightning during a storm.

Incredible moments that I don’t want to miss.

It’s time to move on with our little digital nomad family to the next chapter where we don’t have to fear extreme weather conditions, food shortages, and empty supermarket shelves like here. We are heading south again to New South Wales in Australia, to find a quaint coastal town and rent an apartment with a beach view and, ideally, a pool.

Even if the world is chaotic, and everything seems crazy, off-grid living is not an option for me and my family just yet.

Feel loved, feel hugged.

Namasté

Your Alina

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