Monday, Jul 13, 2009 at 18:41
We came back from
Hay River track a couple of weeks ago.
We went from south to north. The bottom half of the track was similar in driving conditions and difficulty to the start of the
Simpson Desert, i.e. soft sand and a number of dune crossings. The track was pretty
well defined when we went.
The top half of the track was
well defined and relatively easy, in fact you could probably do it in a 2wd vehicle with high clearance if you wanted to.
We left
Birdsville on a Monday and got to
Batten Hill on the following Monday. We took it easy, averaging 50-70km per day. You could do it much quicker than this if you wanted to - probably in 4 days, but doing is this quickly I think you will get quite fatigued and will miss out on enjoying the desert experience.
I recommend buying a CD ROM called
Hay River Northern Territory by Westprint. It has a lot of info on the track,
explorers and has electronic maps for Oztexplorer and an Ozi track plot file and waypoint files.
http://www.mapsdownunder.com.au/cgi-bin/mapshop/WP-HAYCD.html
We have a turbo diesel Prado. We did 850km from
Birdsville to Jervois where we refuelled. We consumed 138 litres for an average of 16.2 litres per hundred km. The southern part of the trip was soft sand so fuel consumption was much worse than the northern section which was a firm track but slow going. Our fuel capacity was 159 litres but we took another 20 litres in a jerry can just in case.
The 850km included about an extra 80km or so to go via the Eyre Creek bypass, we went out to
Poeppel Corner and did the bush tucker tour and sunset tour at
Batten Hill, so it would probably only be about 700km without these.
Someone else on our trip organised the permits but I believe there was only one required.
AnswerID:
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