Here is a road and trip report of my trip across Arnhem Land from Cahill's Crossing to
Ramingining , On arriving at Cahill's Crossing I was delayed for a while because the tide was in and there was 600mm over the crossing, so I parked the truck in the
boat ramp park amid the tourist Coaches, Caravans and 4x4's, Not knowing just how long the wait would be I went for a walk over to the Border Store
shop for a drink and phone the truck Owner about the delay, Then I decided to drive the truck over to the
shop as there was some shade there , after about an hour I went back to the car
park and decided to go and have a look at the
water level ,
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I was surprised to find it had dropped very fast so took a photo from the viewing area and then got mobile out across the dirt, The scenery along the way was great, with rock outcrops and Escarpments , I was amazed at the tree destruction left by Cyclone Monica in 2006 , there were trees lying on the ground for many Klms,
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The corrugations varied from mild to severe , on some good sections I got the truck up 70/80 kph but it didn't last long each time because of the many
creek crossings with
water still in them , some flowing , the bottoms had rocks that was 1st gear work with the truck rocking from side to side and with the trusses up on top made things worse, along the way there were some road works been done and and that was a chance to get the Isuzu sprinting along all the time dodging large rocks , some that looked like they were just waiting for a tyre to pass over them , like bloody little pyramids with a point on top .
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After exiting from creeks the corrugations were most severe for about 1 Klm that restricted speed to around 20kph in 2nd gear all the time searching for smoother parts to gain a bit of speed trying the left side or going right over to the far right, once finding some smoother surface the speed could be increased to the point where I could skip over the finer corrugations , this wouldn't last long because because up would come another
creek and then go through the whole process again, this went on for the whole 276 Klms of dirt and guess what, I love it, so more pleasing than cruising down a 4 lane section of the Hume Hwy or any highway for that matter, I also noticed some odd looking
termite mounds , like the true magnetic mounds I read about many years ago with the edges at North/South so the flat sides get the morning and afternoon warmth,
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I got out as far as the
Blyth River crossing at 9:45pm and decided to call it a day, the eye's were beginning to feel like they needed to close for a few hours plus the concentration was beginning to diminish , I had been going since 5am when I awoke at Noel K's place for an early start and leaving the yard at around 6:30am, The reason I decided to call it a day at the
Blyth was the fact that a Road Train had been bogged down in the middle and I didn't know the
creek so didn't want to have get stuck too and have have the truck sitting in deep
water all night, At 4:30 am I was awaken by the sound of engines when 3 trucks came through heading back toward
Darwin and noticed the line they took that was in an arc down stream so when I finally got mobile at 5:30am I took the same line and all was ok and shallower on that line,
I had 32 Klm to go to
Ramingining so when I got to the
Katherine road I stopped for brekky with only 4.5 K's to go and that was rough too. It didn't take long for the building crew to unload the the truck and then went around to the
shop and put 2 small containers on for the return trip, without the weight on top I made good time doing the 276 Klms of dirt in 4 hours 35 minutes,
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The Isuzu is a great truck to drive , it's the 525 long wheelbase with a 220hp Turbo , this would be a great truck to have a mobile home built on it, it rides the rough actually better than my Troopy, cruises effortless at 100kph fully loaded , has a 6 speed transmission, Exhaust brake, very effective A/C, electic windows, the owner installed a brand new Engel fridge and that was very handy for keeping me up with a nice cold
water and Iced Coffee, No alcohol allowed to be carried, there's a big fine ,
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The Nuvi 765 performed great, the only problem was that the mapping software (CN 2010) was way out on these tracks, and the gps was constantly trying to recalculate, On the other hand I have checked my recorded track on the Garmin Topo (not yet installed to the Nuvi) and I would say it was 98.8% spot on with my track overlayed , and the track record overlayed on Google Earth it was 99.9% accurate,
Below are some more photo's from the trip across the Top End of the NT,
The Garmin track will uploaded to the members File-swap