Driving up the Cape York Peninsula is through wet, jungle "animal country," as one Australian refers to it. Lots of river crossings, mud, rain, etc.
Shane Gerrish describes his solo trip, with plenty of welding and winching.
After ringing from Portland roads i headed to the Frenchmans road and found the Pascoe river crossing at 1.2 metres deep and flowing fast. A bloke on the other side driving an MK patrol TD wagon had decided to try driving the rock wall above the crossing and asked me to wait around, Hugh and crew spent a couple of hours moving rocks to make a fairly level couple of wheel tracks under the 600 mm deep water and i set my patrol up as best i could for winching although i was at an acute angle to the river in deep mud so i dug a couple of holes for the front wheels to anchor in. Hugh slowly crossed to about half way and then got washed off his wheel tracks and bellied out on the rocks. We connected up the winch and dragged him to about 3/4 but the sideways force sheered the high tensile winch mounting bolts off the roller fairlead so we had to resort to the snatch strap. With lots more rock moving and between 30 and 50 hard snatches we finally got him out of the water. It then tok me half a dozen goes to reverse through the mud and up the bank but hugh couldn't get through the mud due to the ruts from my 35 inch muddies so i went back down and dragged him out of the mud and up the bank to dry ground.All up it took 4 1/2 to 5 hours to get him out...great fun though!
...
Most of the day was spent bending, bashing and welding the spring mounts back into place but i could not get good penetration with the welder, i think i needed smaller rods and to learn how to weld!
They routinely refer to crossing 600mm deep rivers, which is only 15" deep, as if they were a big deal. Until I saw this picture and realized that perhaps the 600mm is some other measurement, like over the threshold of the door, or over the hood, or something else.
Best part of these Palo Alto nerds' trip report is them referring to a truck-bogging incident they had suffered in Nevada the previous year which required a $750USD tow!
Theirs was a garden variety trip heading west out of Alice Springs into the West MacDonnells in a rented Hertz 4x4 (which they mentioned had no use restrictions).
Took a preliminary look around...
australian4wdhire.com.au bills itself as 'The Australian 4wd Rental Specialist.'
They do seem to have the full range of vehicles . In addition to the standard big and small 4x4s, like the Land Cruiser and the Rav4, they have more specialized vehicles: offroad campers and better-equipped offroad vehicles. Depending on the route we decide, and the availability of roadhouses, some combination of the above vehicles should work for us.
Although price haggling is a long way off, for at least some rental places I saw that the rates were insane -- low upfront, but then a 100km (62 miles) per day mileage allowance, 28c (18c USD) extra per mile!
It might also be possible to arrange an advantageous deal itinerary by virtue of us reversing the normal one way flow of drop-off rentals, for which there is normally a $600AUD surcharge. Arranging a one-way rental also would allow us to cross more unique territory.
Hailed as the southern hemisphere's fastest, richest, toughest and longest desert race for motorcycles and cars. A 460km return journey of rugged outback racing, starting 12 km south of Alice Springs along the Old South Road.
Please note that under the 'links' column, I point to a drilldown page for various points of interest in Australia we might be interested in. We should try to accumulate a repository of those. It will help us figure out a good itinerary.
The Argyle mine, located in the Kimberley region in the far north east of Western Australia, is the world’s largest single producer of diamonds.
Seems like everyone and their brother offers a tourist trip to the mine, flying out of Kununurra (far north Australia) and into the mine for an afternoon's tour. Perhaps it would be possible to drive up there?
There seems to be lots of birdwatching opportunities where floodplains pop up in the middle of nowhere and thousands of birds alight.
Lake Gregory is one example, off the Tanami Track. Lonely Planet claims "dring one bird-surveying expedition more than 240,000 water birds of 57 species were counted, including cormorants, pink-eared ducks, plumed whistle-ducks, coots, darters, egrets and brolgas." [p181]
Along the Tanami Track is 'The Granites' gold mine that currently produces 5000kg gold per year. Nearby are old ruins from mines in the 1930s which produced much less gold.
30 miles west is Dead Bullock Soak mining area. The ore from Dead Bullock Soak is carted to the Granites site for treatment along a new bitumen road (the only one for 100's of kilos) on huge four-trailer road trains, each carting well over 100 tonnes of ore. These monsters travel at great speed and require at least one km to stop.
Might be fun to get some regular and KAP photos of these road trains, as well as a chance for industrial archeology of the ruins. Also could try to line up a tour of the mine.
(SOURCE: p179-180 Lonely Planet)
Only open between April and September, this mountain range is deeply isolated and features bee-hive shaped mountains of striped black and red sandstone. In addition to the beautiful geology, there is aboriginal art and burial grounds here.
// Ideas
This might be an excellent place for some Kite Aerial Photography.
// Links
So I have migrated the Outback2003 blog over from blogger.com to serve as the anchor page for the entire outback2003/ section. I'm just using one of the default styles. I will develop in parallel another template/styles that will be more appropriate, but I don't want to wait until I get that sorted out.
All the entries are imported now, and they are archived in the October Archives.
One reason it has been hard to figure out potential itineraries is that the the size of the Outback is enormous. It's the equivalent of me saying, "hey, lets explore colorado, nevada, utah, california, arizona, and new mexico by 4x4 in two weeks (if there was about 1/20th the number of roads and 1/2000th the number of people).
One approach I thought of tonight was to evaluate different routes in terms of how much time they'd take. Given my last three 4x4 trips, I came up with different classifications of days we experienced.
Ok, given those categories, how many miles could you expect to cover?
In this way we can more properly predict what we can bite off and chew.
I brainstormed a bit this evening over coffee downtown.
Anything appeal/repulse you ?
You can think of all sorts of dimensions to choose a route
//Scenery Types
There are all sorts of things you can choose to sightsee for... In Nevada we always found ourselves seeking out obscure abandoned mines and ruins, but then we'd run into a guy out looking for fresh flowers and animals. In Australia there's everything from ruins to flora-and-fauna to aboriginal culture to geographical wonders to the weird locals and their weird little towns.
There is definitely an appeal to specialization and the lure of having done a thorough examination of some arbitrary theme. It sort of gives a purpose, however goofy, to the trip. KAP Photography was our general excuse for trips. On the other hand, most of us don't have the luxury of a four-hour flight to Australia, so a more generalized trip seeing a variety of stuff, to get a rounded flavor of Australia's Outback might be preferable. Also, with five people on the trip, that both my mom and Ling are really going to be interested in two week's of searching out abandoned Opal mines seems very unlikely.
//Road quality
Again, travel on 3mph rugged trails with lots of difficult 4x4 driving sounds fun, it also doesn't get you very far very fast. As well, my last experience driving for two hours on washboard roads at night, rally-car style, although humorous, might get old if it were extended into the eighteenth hour.
Some tradeoff has to be made in regards to how much stuff we want to see versus how much time is spent on that journey. It might make more sense to identify islands of interest (which would include offroad driving at them) and then just take the more normal stretches of road to hop between them.
//Types of experience
Along the same sort of theme... what exactly do we want to be doing? Presumably not spending every day twelve hours in the car in some sort of demented slater-family-lemans. How much do we want to sit around chilling, out walking around exploring, stopping over for sites, etc. Probably don't want to expect to cover that many miles per day. I don't think from our previous trips we average much over 300 miles per day once we got to the general vicinity of where we were going.
Not only that, but do we want to, for example, bring another generation of the KAP rig?
//Accomodations
Have to figure out some comfortable level of accomodations we can tolerate.
//Remoteness
Remoteness is very appealing and lots of fun, however maybe for its own sake on this trip, it doesn't make that much sense -- way too far along one dimension for what we want. When I say remoteness, I mean remoteness in the Austrlian Outback sense-- tracks that aren't passed by a car in three weeks, where Ham Radio is the only form of communication, etc. Sounds fun for a future trip though.
One basic principle we can agree on is that we don't want to be there when it's too hot or when there's going to be rain. Probably the temperature sweet spot is the 60-80F range, and if you have to break out of that, cooler is better than hotter. Rain could be a real spoiler to 4wd if we are crossing streams and things, and trying to take photographs. The only good thing about it is if we can catch the tail ends of rains that have watered a desert to flowery life. That could be beautiful and something I've never timed properly.