Just back from major trip and I certainly I got the feeling that its a sausage factory for campers.
At the start we had 6 vehicles , one upgraded to a full caravan and ruled themselves out, one got a job offer to good to turn down a couple of days into our trip and another wrote off there brand new crossover and cruiser
just before hooking up with us in W.A.
This left us with a manageable 3 cars & campers for our 8 week 15000km trip.
But we still found this a lot more limiting than our usual "Sleep in the car and tow nothing" travel method.
Our notes told us that recently the last offical
Kimberley free camp was closed and the method of travel being promoted was to drive on a badly corrugated road to the next national park or station and
camp in a poor quality overated and crowded
camp area.
Most but not all of the
places had little to do or maybe a walk to a
gorge , have a swim then get hot andbot hered again before walking back to the distant car park !
Cape Leveque was meant to be good from our pre-trip research but we struggled to find a single decent 4wd track almost everything was "NO ACCESS" - or very limited and campsites were heavily overcrowded.
True it was busy , but not the peak season.
There was some limited access if you were booked into "xyz" resort, but the whole idea of a remote challenging
place to
check out seems to have been lost.
We visited all the main
places and my favourite
gorge was
Bell gorge and while its a classic loverly waterfall into a swim pool and was great , the hot walking/driving/climbing from a distant
carpark made it hardly worth the effort.
One over crowded place was
El Questro and it actually had a couple of short but real 4wd
hill climbs but the overall atmosphere of "No Go" signs and queueing was such that of the 4 days there we choose to leave on 3 days and drive the 200km return trip to Wydham , which we thought was a much more interesting area.
Some
places, like
Home Valley , had an entrance drive which went right past the campsites and was just bulldust and thick clouds of dust hung in the air after each car passed.
I have no doubt that a single car with local knowledge could have found a way to make it work but when your planning for a few with all there seperate wishes, and the general lack of flexibility, its a lot harder than the
places we usual frequent in Victoria.
Indeed for the trip up from
Melbourne to
Broome I sucessfully planned 10 free camps in a row with no issues yet on the
Gibb river road we managed only 1 genuine , "away from it all"
free camp.