Wednesday, Apr 17, 2002 at 00:00
Stuart,
My wife and I are Australian. Just over here for something different.
We want to base the trip around National Parks (island, mountain, rainforest and outback), World
Heritage sites and
bush camping, and spend as little time in capital cities as possible. Qld, NT and WA are the areas we want to cover
well. Vic, NSW and SA we can get back to during annual holidays from
Melbourne. So basically it will be a Fraser Island to
Perth via
Cape York, the Alice and
Darwin. We don't have much experience with 4WD'ing apart from helping dig other peoples vehicles out, but we have done alot of camping and hiking.
We want to see some remote areas (Kimberly,
Cape York,
Kakadu etc) so will be driving on all sorts of roads, and will be buying our own 4WD to do the trip (probably Jackeroo or Prado TD). I haven't driven a 4WD for more than afew days before and that was only on bitumen. I do intend getting us on a driving course before departing to get assitance with technicque and just as importantly, recovery gear.
We've decided that July/August would be a good time to start because we should be able to get across the top before the rains start. We were planning on a counter-clockwise route, departing
Melbourne and basically transiting up to Fraser Island. This is going to be the starting point of our trip. We want to try and get up to Iron Range NP as our most northerly point, and then head down and across to
Darwin. The tricky part is then getting to both the Kimberly and
Alice Springs with-out too much back tracking (probably
Darwin - Stuart Hwy - Ayers
Rock - Tanami - Kimberly), before heading to
Broome and then down the coast before the wet season starts.
Hope that helps,
Rohan.
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