This link has some interesting bit of Field Wisdom and Experience for 4wd'g in the outback.
Here is the Beadell's Family Web Site. I was momentarily amused with the idea of listening to audio versions of Len's books, but then when I heard the samples, I had some difficulty with them... The accent plus the the rote reading of them sounded like trouble on a long, bouncing, slogging ride through the desert. 'Professional' readers in books-on-tape can be hard enough to listen to, and they strive to avoid monotony... Think I will enjoy Len's tales in book-form.
Our crew will be my wife and I (from Singapore), my friend (from California), and my parents (from Pennsylvania).
All together we'll have about two weeks max of days off. So that probably includes three days worth of flights, layovers, and so on. So presume we have about ten or eleven days where we can actually do something fun.
We'd rather go when it was cooler and drier than hotter and wetter, so probably July or August we'd want to come.
The purpose of the trip is a well-rounded adventure through the Outback. My buddy and parents have never been to Australia at all. My wife has only been to Brisbane, and my experience has been limited to rock climbing in the Blue Mountains and Mt. Arapiles.
Consequently, we're not looking to spend ten day doing nothing but hardcore 4wd'ing. If we wanted that, it'd be a lot cheaper and simpler for us to have just gone to the Rubicon Trail in California. Instead we're looking to the 4wds more to help us get to obscure, difficult places that have interesting things to see and experience.
In other words, our idea with the trucks would be to enable us to get away from the crowds and to the interesting bits of the backcountry, as well as spend some afternoons doing more challenging offroad driving puzzles.
We've also done enough road trips to realize that we don't like pure driving holidays where each day is another mission to cover three hundred miles and check off a waypoint. We like to make a run to somewhere interesting, and walk, drive around and savour the place for a while. In fact, we've thought about our past trips and have figured out the different sorts of days we normally have. Our itinerary will need to budget for these different sorts of days.
What sort of stuff do we like to do on these trips?
Lots of photography! Not only do we have a big collection of 35mm gear for travel photography, we also have a boot-full of weird gear that allows us to take pictures with a camera suspended from a monster kite.
Geocaching. We like to find geocaches but even more we like to hide our own geocaches... GPS's and maps are fun.
Industrial Archeology. My dad and my friend are engineers. I'm a dilletante. All of us love to wander around abandoned industrial sites and see skeletons of old machinery, mines, and buildings.
Four wheel driving. The typical thing, find a hard trail and puzzle our way up it, enjoying the challenge.
What sort of Australia-specific stuff would we like to mix into our trip?
I'm sure my list of 'Australia-specific' stuff sounds corny to an Australian. I guess my point is that we'd like to get a bit of the feel of the Outback, not just pass through it.
Insofar as you can figure out a few seminal experiences that would help us in doing that, it would be great.
An even better answer is one in which there are people we can look forward to meeting, visit with, and actually talk to. It's one thing to goto a place, read the description from a book, take a photo, and move on. It's much more rewarding when there are people to visit with and ask questions of. (Not specifically tour guides, just friendly folks willing to talk to people interested in their lives)
With those ideas in mind we've hashed out ideas ourselves. So far the best thing we've come up with is the general plan to get to Alice Springs, rent a house there which we can use as a base for at least part of the trip, and then venture out each day to different destinations. For another part of the trip, take an extended three or four day offroad trip that runs off into the bush and eventually loops back to Alice Spring.
This seems like the best way to maximize our intersting days and minimize the tedious driving days. Furthermore, aside from me, and perhaps my dad, the rest of the crew has very little interest in a lot of backcountry camping. I can probably bully them into three nights or so, but beyond that, it's difficult. And at any rate, having a nice place to stay gives us time at night to enjoy ourselves, write in our journals, reminisce, and plan the next day's journey. (Remember, we see our parents and friends perhaps once a year)
With these general ideas in mind, hopefully you'll have some ideas for what we could do. We are totally open to a completely different plan you might suggest. We're open to any solution to the criteria we've listed.
We all look forward to hearing your ideas and moving toward a great itinerary!
In the last month a few things have given me better perspective on the problem of selecting the Australian Itinerary...
First, Thirty-One-Die was out here for a couple weeks. We scenarioed some experimental routes. We thought we had selected reasonable trips. On analysis we found that they all needed a staggering amount of driving to accomplish.
Going at it another way, starting with how many days we had to play with, and how many miles we might drive on those days (understanding some days we can drive more than others), we came up with some routes. They looked pathetically small on the map.
But the numbers and our experiences don't lie -- two weeks is a short time in the Outback. We cannot afford too many long 'approach drives' to our target areas. It seemed to Matt and I that flying into Alice Springs (there is plenty interesting to see in Central Australia) looked like it minimized these wasteful stretch drives and maximized the interesting stuff.
Secondly, Ah-Ling and I just returned from ten days in Kerala State, India. It was an enormously comfortable trip. The basic scheme was: hole up in very nice hotels with good bathrooms, beds, and porches. Run out during the day and enjoy the stinky, sweaty town, then come back for periodic showerings, shittings, and changes of clothes. The evenings we spent relaxing, writing, and reading on the porch.
So it seems to me that I good plan might be that we rent a house in Alice Springs that has several bedrooms, decent facilities, a nice porch, a BBQ. Then for at least a chunk of our week down there, we operate from it like Ling and I did in India... Run off during the day and do what we want, and then come back to the place at night, relax and hang out. This gives us some flexibility. If we can sort out a longer, several-day loop trip to make out of Alice and back, then we can rough it during that period.
I like the idea of having a more proper base than just a couple Best Western hotel rooms. We go out exploring all day, come back after nightfall, fire up a bbq outside, take a shower, sit around and eat, bullshit, and plan the next day's mission. All the while, our equipment is charging, and maybe do some last minute internet research, etc. It would be more comfortable, we could cook some of our own stuff instead of continual restaurant meals (in all my desert trips I have always, always hated the food. And once again, returned from India, I hate eggs like poison)
I only very briefly looked around the several awful tourists sites on Alice Springs. I am sure such places exist and I will have to do further research on them. Also, I had a name for a guy who, for a fee, would write up interesting trip itineraries in the Austrlian Outback. I will contact him and find out what he thinks some interesting 'base' areas might be, and interesting destinations around them.