Tag: 4WD

Simpson Desert or bust

 

Simpson Desert
Photo by Graham Waters: Simpson Desert crossing on hold for now!

Although I find the Australian outback fascinating and a little scary, I am unlikely to join the increasing numbers of people whose bucket list item is crossing the Simpson Desert.

It’s not just that we don’t own a 4WD. I/we lack the essential Australian pioneering ability to fix things that break down. Regardless, thousands of people trek across the Simpson Desert each year, from Birdsville in Queensland to Dalhousie Springs in South Australia.

The actual distance travelled between Birdsville and Dalhousie Springs (about 480 kms), seems like a jaunt compared to the 18-hour journey from Brisbane to Birdsville. The conventional first leg, however, is a comparative dawdle, with its largely bitumen and dirt road stretches between Queensland’s capital and the famous outpost which each year draws tourists and adventurers to the annual Birdsville Races and Big Red Bash.

Crossing the Simpson Desert requires thorough preparation and all the skills to navigate a 4WD vehicle across 1,100+ sand dunes. Most guides to the trek recommend an average speed of between 15 and 20 kmh (on tyres deflated to about 20psi), so the crossing can take four or five days.

There are no services between Birdsville and Dalhousie so you need to carry your own food, water and fuel. The key thing to remember is that traversing sand dunes consumes double the amount of fuel you would use on a conventional road. It is recommended to travel in convoy with friends as back-up, in case something goes wrong.

The convoy strategy paid off for Sunshine coast residents Graham Waters and Evelyn Harris, whose planned Simpson Desert crossing went awry on the notoriously corrugated Strzelecki Track.

The party of seven in three vehicles travelled south to Bourke, Cameron Corner and Innamincka, planning to cross the Simpson from west to east.

About 100 kms south of Innamincka, Graham heard an ominous rattle in the rear of the vehicle. Thinking he had a flat tyre, he got out to find that five of the six wheel nuts holding the wheel to the rear axle of his Ford 4WD had sheared off.

“If the sixth nut had broken off, anything could have happened, so in that way we were lucky,” Graham said.

Graham set about ‘borrowing’ wheel nuts from other tyres in the hope they could keep going as far as Moomba. A seasoned four-wheel drive explorer (expeditions include a three-month trip to Cape York), Graham realised he had to find expert help.

“We were there for two nights, off the side of the road. It’s a relatively busy road, so truckies kept stopping to ask if we needed help.

“We tried going back to Innamincka but the wheel started rattling again, “We also tried to drive to Moomba but the replacement nuts wouldn’t hold.”

In the end, a low-loader came out to take the vehicle to the Santos gas plant at Moomba. After a temporary fix at the Moomba workshops, they drove to Port Augusta.

“It ended up being a $5,000 exercise, including the towing, two new axles and the labour.

“But if you did this as an organised tour, it would probably cost that much at least for each person,” Graham added.

Once the vehicle was repaired in Port Augusta, they travelled north via the Flinders Ranges and Lake Eyre before starting the Simpson Desert crossing at Dalhousie Springs.

“We did talk about packing it in and just going home, but after a night in a B&B in Port Augusta, we got our second wind and decided to keep going.

“We’re really glad we did, because if you slow down and stop frequently, you realise the desert, while it’s stark and windy, is a beautiful place full of wild flowers and birdlife.”

“When you are camped out there at night under the stars all you can hear is the occasional howl from a dingo or a grunt from a feral camel. It’s a magic experience.”

Evelyn knew with one look at the damaged wheel it was a case of “how much is it going to cost to get us out of this situation”.

“Usually Graham can bodgie things up, but this time he couldn’t. It’s all part of the adventure, though. You hope it won’t happen, but if it does you can make the best of it”.

Travelling in convoy also proved crucial for Brisbane couple David Caddie and Margaret Pope while on a Simpson Desert crossing. David was driving his Toyota Prado, customised to include a slide-out camp kitchen, fridge and pantry built in to the back of the vehicle. Unfortunately, at the convoy’s first overnight stop, David found he could not get the rear doors open. They had become jammed with the fine powdery substance known as bull dust.

“Luckily the people we were traveling with love their food so they had plenty”, he said. “At least enough till we got to Alice Springs and a smash repairer used a Spit Water Pressure Cleaner to wash out the dust”.

Peter and Linda Scharf’s 4WD motto is to pack light and don’t be in a hurry. A few years ago, he and Linda took 21 days to traverse the 1,850km Canning Stock Route in Western Australia in a Land Rover with a tent, an HF Flying Doctor radio and basic supplies.

“For us it is all about preparation. You pack light and the things you pack need to have multiple uses. Most people take way more clothes than they actually need.

Peter and Linda did carry tools and spare parts, which came in handy when a shock absorber broke.

“For a long time we travelled without long-range communications. Now we have an HF radio with a range of about 3,000 kilometres.”

But as Peter says, one ought not to rely on technology. “You can only guarantee satellite phone coverage of about 80%. So there are still places, especially in northern Australia, where they won’t work.” 

Remote area 4WD traveller John Greig told FOMM the stresses and strains on vehicle chassis/bodies on desert tracks can be enormous.

“These days almost every popular desert crossing, including the Canning Stock Route, is suffering from diagonally opposed holes, opening up in the wheel tracks”.

“This is mainly caused by drivers not dropping their tyre pressures low enough”.

Potential setbacks aside, if you have a hankering to cross the Simpson Desert, the best time is between April and October.

Handy tips abound on the internet, including this one drawn from many sources:

While the Australian desert outback is a beautifully scary and remote place, technology and the capabilities of modern 4WD vehicles have made it far less daunting. Robyn Davidson found fame after her 1977 crossing of the Gibson Desert between Alice Springs and the Indian Ocean. She crossed the 1,700 kilometres on foot, with four camels and a dog.

Her book about one woman’s quest for solitude, Tracks, was subsequently made into a movie starring Mia Wasikowska as Davidson.

In a recent ABC interview, Davidson conceded that doing the same trip in the same way would be impossible today.

“Back then there were no mobile or satellite phones. (You’d) come across a two-way radio every three months – it was how you got messages out of there.”

Davidson, who grew up on a mid-western Queensland cattle station, believes one of the greatest gifts of living in a country like Australia is the physically large open spaces.

She had a fascination with the desert and wonders now if those “those early sensual signals of dry air and the smell of dry grass” of her childhood ran deep.

“Perhaps all Australians have some sense of the desert back there buried in their psyches,” she said.

 

 “This creed of the desert seemed inexpressible in words and indeed in thought”.     T. E. Lawrence

 All photos (including drone footage) by Graham Waters.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cape York or bust

cape-york-tourism
Cape York or bust

No 5 in an outback series

On the last day of Queensland’s school holidays, a steady line of dusty 4WD’s returning from Cape York are queuing up for the Daintree River ferry crossing. Many of these road-beaten vehicles are rentals from Cairns. You can tell the real deal 4WD by the snorkel (a vertical exhaust above the cabin – designed for crossing creek and rivers without killing the engine).

Kids or even adults have written epitaphs on the dusty windows including “Cape York or bust” “Been there done that” and “still driving”.

(And my very favourite one-“Capey McCapeface”.Ed)

The bitumen road peters out just past Cape Tribulation in the Daintree rainforest. Intrepid travellers with appropriate vehicles can take the scenic Bloomfield track to Cooktown then loop back along a sealed road to Lakeland, where the 582 kms journey to Weipa begins. After Weipa, the route becomes a 4WD dirt road with a few sealed sections, all up 908.4 kms, a 28 hour drive to the northernmost tip of Australia. Last time a survey was done, between 60,000 and 70,000 people had made the arduous trek every year. Those are small numbers compared to the volume of tourists visiting Uluru or Kakadu National Park, but in the context of a wild, undeveloped frontier, it’s a lot of traffic.

Some take organised 4WD tours, some fly/drive; others take a boat to Cape York and come back by road. If you do decide to drive from Lakeland, you have an estimated 15 and a half hour journey to Weipa (averaging 37 kmh). By contrast, the bitumen road from Cairns to Lakeland is a three hour drive (250 kms).

You might know that our outback travelling is constrained by the limitations of a six-cylinder rear-wheel drive vehicle and a 30 year old caravan. It’s a high-set van, but as recent journeys on unsealed roads have shown, the suspension is not built for corrugations. We call the 271 kms short cut from Hughenden to The Lynd, which has sealed sections and some rough stretches, ‘The Road that Broke the Wardrobe Door’.

So our adventures north of Cairns were limited to a day trip from Newell Beach to Cape Tribulation and back, via a cruise on the Daintree River, two hikes in the rainforest and the extreme disappointment that arose from listening to the Broncos getting thrashed by the Warriors (well may you scoff and say, ‘what’s that about being in the moment’?).

Daintree-Cape-York
Daintree River croc – Cape York or Bust

Despite the high tide, we saw three crocodiles on the (highly recommended) one-hour Solar Whisper cruise, including a 3m croc known as Scooter who decided to swim along the mangrove-lined bank a few metres from the boat. John the skipper pointed out a few birds including an Azure Kingfisher, a Papuan Frogmouth, a Rufous Night Heron and Radjah Shelducks. (There are photos on my camera, but the downloading process is rather primitive. Ed)

As for Cape York or bust, I can only repeat what authorities will tell you: take extra fuel, water, tyres, vehicle spares, a jack or two and a shovel. Always give way to wildlife. Note to those who are tempted: there is no mobile reception in much of the Cape region and satellite phones do not always work.

Nevertheless, Cape York or bust is a major bucket list item for the intrepid traveller; some ride trail bikes, others mountain bikes and more than a few walk the track, carrying their food and shelter on their backs.

Tourism is just one part of the Cape York story, a tussle between pro-development lobbyists (remember the Spaceport?), the mining industry, pastoralists, the traditional owners and increasing awareness that this pristine wilderness has to be protected for all time.

Even on the relatively tame Mossman to Daintree road there are decisions for the risk-averse. We don’t often take guided tours, but when it comes to croc-spotting (that’s Scooter on the left) on the Daintree River, go with an expert. I told our skipper about Paddy McHugh’s chilling song, Dan O’Halloran. He’d not heard of it, but I said he should look it up but maybe not share with his passengers. Not to spoil a good story song, I’ll just give you the chorus line: “Nobody knows what happened to Dan O’Halloran except me, and it makes me shiver”.

As we drove back along the narrow, winding but sealed road from Cape Tribulation, I wondered if (in the future) I had a Cape York or bust trip in me, and, when I did, would it be a sealed highway by then.

Successive governments have made efforts to upgrade the road from Lakeland to Weipa, which in 2014 still had 380 kms of dirt road, impassable after rain.

The Federal and State governments co-funded work to seal sections of road between Lakeland and Weipa, on the Cape’s west coast. Weipa is the site of a major mining operation and a deep water port. So there are commercial imperatives involved with sealing that road.

But it is a slow process, at about 30 kms per year on average between 2014 and 2018. The slow pace of the project was used as an election issue in 2017.

The numbers of tourists visiting the region fluctuate according to economic conditions and extreme weather events. Studies have concluded that the majority of Cape York adventurers are self-contained, so their contribution to the local economy is negligible.

As the Federal Government’s Wild Rivers report observed, Cape York is large and underdeveloped and only accessible for eight or nine months of the year. The region comprises 15% of Queensland in area, but accounts for only 0.3% of the State’s population. Cape York’s residents are amongst the most disadvantaged in Queensland. More than half (54%) of Cape York people aged 15 years and over have a gross weekly income of less than $400 per week.

While sealing Cape York’s main road and also minor roads to Aboriginal communities might be a good thing for locals (less wear and tear on their vehicles and all-weather access), one ought not to make the trek too easy. Cape York has been nominated as a UNESCO World Heritage site (near neighbours, the Great Barrier Reef and the Queensland Wet Tropics, are already listed). But as the University of Melbourne’s Jo Caust recently wrote in The Conversation, some World Heritage listed sites are being loved to death and authorities need to exert some control over visitor numbers.

When you read about the impact of mass tourism on Cambodia’s Angkor Wat and Vietnam’s Hoi An, a coastal town that escaped the ravages of war, perhaps it’s a good thing that mass tourism is unlikely in Queensland’s rugged and remote top end.