Tanami Road

Yep you should be right providing you are sensible with tyre pressures and drive to the conditions.

Have a look through this lot. There have been many recent threads about vans on the Tanami and the GRR. This one covers the Tanami.

Tanami conditions

and here for the GRR

Caravan on the Gibb

Cheers Mick

What type of van do you have?


We did both the Tanami and GRR last year and saw vans on both. We stopped on the Tanami to hlep a Bushtracker owner with problems (items inside needed tightening up after working loose from all the corrugations). Our speed limit was down to 20kms in part. So even with a true off roader, things can go wrong. That's not to say the road conditions will be that bad when you visit.


For the GRR, I feel you could drive the GRR itself in 2wd, but the question is, where do you want to get off it to see all the gorges? The side tracks can be the issue with bottoming out on creek crossings so it's not really the GRR that will cause you any problem.


If you asked me whether I would take our van on both? The answer is no, but that's a choice we've made. Instead we got a TVan....fixed all our problems :-)

Thanks for your feedback this will be our 1st time on the GRR and tanami track so we don't want to miss the gorges, when you say we may not get there is it also due to tight tracks and nowhere to to turn around. Look forward to replys and as much info as possible. Caravan is a Trakmaster.

yes you can mate but It's up to you to drive to the conditions.

I work out on the Tanami at on of the gold mines and to give you an idea we get a triple roadtrain of parts every week from the same transport company and this driver lets ALL his tyres down to 40-45 psi and drives at 30kmh and very very rarely are we repairing any damage on his trucks.

On the other hand we get deliveries from other first time truckdrivers out here of lime & food ect and I have repaired trucks and trailers with broken airbags, airtanks & mountings, shockys missing mudguards blown tyres (too much to list) all because there tyres are fully inflated and there carrying too much speed.

You get the idea................enjoy your trip mate

Hi Troopy..
We did the Tanami last year.. Started out from Alice Springs to Halls Creek with a stop in Wolf Creek Crator.. In Alice some people said it was fine, others said it was horrible! Just depends on who you talk to.. In short we averaged around 80km an hour most of the time. There are long stretches that are good, but in between there are small and large corrugations.. The key is to drop the tyre pressure and drive sensibly.. If you want to see what it's like to drive the Tanami, you can. We had a Dashcam video running for our whole trip. I've been slicing them down into smaller pieces and uploading on Youtube. The first Tanami video is the one from Alice Springs.. Each video shows the date/time and the speed in km/h.. So you can see how fast I go across the various sections.. There are videos for Halls Creek, Duncan Road, up to bungle Bungles etc.. I'm working on editing and uploading the sections to Mitchell Falls and Kalumburu and the rest of the Gibb..
The Video channel is here Travelling Vikings
The First Tanami video from Alice is here..
Enjoy!
Rgds,
Simmi

Thanks Simmi , Any more footage would be great where you towing if you we're what size van.

For more videos of the Tanami, got to the Youtube Channel, scroll down and you will find Videos 8 - 29 cover off the Tanami Track end to end, including the trip to Wolf Creek meteorite crator..
Simmi