Outback driving

Like almost all visitors to the Red Centre, one of the reasons to visit was to see Uluru (Ayers Rock), which is surely one of the wonders of the world. At the same time, by virtue of the number of visitors, it's a difficult place to get a sense of the vast emptiness of the Red Centre. If you want to take photos of Uluru at sunset or dawn, you will find yourself sharing the viewing areas with tens, if not hundreds, of other camera-toting tourists. Moreover, there is only one route on sealed roads to make the nigh-on 500 kilometer journey (each way) from Alice, and a trip to King’s Canyon is a there-and-back side trip of about 300 kilometers on top of that. The country the roads pass through is of course empty by most standards, with roadhouses (fuel station, convenience store, café and accommodation) at average intervals of perhaps a hundred kilometers, but the roads are well-beaten tourist routes and pass through relatively monotonous terrain.

The solution to this problem is the Mereenie Loop – a route that links the point at which the tarmac runs out on the roads that run westwards from Alice, to the point at which the tarmac starts again at Kings Canyon, through landscape that is dominated by the sharply etched relief of rocky hill ranges. In doing so, it creates a more or less circular route that allows you to take in King’s Canyon and Uluru without too much back-tracking, and takes you through some of the finest landscape in the Red Centre. When it’s in good condition, the Mereenie Loop would be passable in a two-wheel drive vehicle (although you might find that you lost a few car parts that rattled loose in the process), but in any case, the campervan companies aren’t keen on you destroying their vehicles, so if you take a 2WD van onto unsealed road you are in breach of contract, consequently uninsured, and liable for the full cost of any damage you do to the vehicle, yourself, or third parties. (I find this difficult to believe, but it appears that third party motor insurance is not a legal requirement in Australia.) This was the reason that I hired a 4WD campervan – a modified Land Cruiser – for the part of my trip in the Red Centre. And once I had a 4WD it allowed me to make a side trip to a beautiful spot known as Palm Valley.

Now heading off alone, even in a 4WD, into the Australian outback does not sound a very sensible proposition, but I am not a great risk-taker and a further safety cushion is provided by a finely developed sense of how embarrassing it would be to have to call out the cavalry because of foolhardy behaviour. My first level of protection was avoiding getting into trouble in the first place: I would never have rented a 4WD without a reasonable amount of experience of driving both 2WDs and 4WDs off road (and although I went off-tarmac in the Red Centre, I didn’t go off-‘road’), and driving relatively long distances on unsealed roads. I also did some fairly exhaustive research before I went, including getting the Hema maps, which show what services are available where:

and finding information on the internet about both the 4WD driving conditions and on the details of camp sites and other facilities. And then I checked the condition of the roads and the weather forecast with the Information Centre in Alice before I set out. Lastly, I planned my route so that I had enough fuel to cover increased fuel consumption or being unable to get fuel at fuel stations marked on the map, and so that, if I ever ran into road conditions that I was not confident of driving through, I could simply retrace my steps – if necessary all the way back to Alice. (The Land Cruiser had two fuel tanks, although apart from the last day back to Alice, I never used more than half of the first tank before refilling. The green light that appears to be warning that you are heading off the road into the shrubbery indicates that 4WD is engaged.)

Level two of protection was being able to cope if I did get stuck without calling out the cavalry: I only used routes that had enough traffic on them that if I broke down or got bogged I would only have to wait a couple of hours at most for another vehicle to come along who could help me either directly, or by taking a message to call out a breakdown truck or whatever. At the same time, I had enough food and water that I could have waited days for someone to come along.

And level three was calling out the cavalry: this is an emergency beacon that when activated will bring you emergency aid wherever you are in Australia within two hours:

The girl at the campervan hire looked me sternly in the eye, and said that I should only use it for a life-threatening emergency – and not just if I had a flat tyre. To be honest, the only situation I could imagine where I would use it would be if I got bitten by a snake – and the realistic chance of that happening was tiny.