Should you free camp?

It’s the buzz-phrase on every caravan salesperson’s lips: ‘Ideal for free-camping’. But what does that mean?

Basically, it means staying overnight or longer with your caravan or camper without paying a site fee. But if it’s so good and popular, why isn’t everyone doing it and why aren’t all caravan parks going broke?

Let’s look at the pros and cons...

LOCATION

With some exceptions, free-camps are either established or tolerated by local shires and councils in less-trafficked areas.

Again, with some exceptions, you’re less likely to find a flat, grassy, shaded area next to a popular surf break and great shops and restaurants for the simple fact that the land there is too valuable to squander on travellers, who may or may not shop and refuel locally.

Having said that, the same councils that put up the ‘RV Friendly Town’ signs, see the benefit in making their free-camp a travellers’ destination – something that will be talked about on caravan blogs and social media sites and will encourage people to drive a little less, or a little further, to stay there.

And if the location is right, maybe a few days, during which the money saved on overnight fees will quite likely be spent on local food, souvenirs and fuel.

Of course, you can have too much of a good thig and to discourage their free-camp becoming a semi-permanent address for the unemployed, most have a stay-limit of 40-72 hours, sometimes more.

It makes sense for fellow travellers too. You’re less likely to stop overnight in what looks like a gypsy camp, where the potted plants indicate that this is someone’s home or the base for a traveling circus, rather than their temporary resting place.

CONVENIENCE

You need to balance the location of free camps with their convenience to the local places you want to visit. For example, in the Hunter Valley area, the excellent and roomy peripheral free-camps at the Wollombi and Broke – both in rural settings and near to a pub and convenience stores – are around 20-30km away from the popular wineries.

In the case of the beautiful grassy area at the Wollombi Tavern, it’s at the end of a twisting, large-caravan-unfriendly road beloved by motorcyclists, but at Broke it’s a good, straightforward run to the major tasting and dining areas in Pokolbin.

So, if  you are there for a few days, you’re going to rack up around 150km in to-and-fro travelling, which costs you fuel. You need to balance this against the cost of a centrally-located caravan park, like the Wine Country Holiday Park in Cessnock, which offers security, power, facilities, etc. from $30 per night.

FACILITIES

Expect nothing and be grateful for what you get. In most cases you simply get a communal space to stop overnight and nothing more. But in rare instances you get potable (drinking) water, rubbish bins, toilets and even hot showers.

At Wallabadah on the New England Highway, the local Shire found that creating a free camp next to its beautiful First Fleet Memorial Gardens encouraged more visitors and donations to their maintenance, so they installed rubbish bins and a facilities block.

It’s a vast area, located 55km south of Tamworth comfortably off the busy New England Highway where you can  camp in relative peace and seclusion.

In many otters, you can use the facilities of an adjacent Visitors’’ Centre, town or sports ground toilet block, or pub.

Of course, if you travel self-contained with your own shower and toilet, like we do, you really don’t need any of these facilities.

But while you can usually refill your fresh water tanks via the separate hose at the increasing number of toilet dump points appearing along the route, there’s nothing like the luxury of a long hot shower – one that you can enjoy on a powered site in a regular camp ground when it comes to washing that red dirt out of your hair, or clothes, or laundering your ‘smalls’.

SECURITY

There’s strength in numbers, but that doesn’t mean everyone can be trusted. We’d recommend that you lock your doors when out for the day or put a locking tether on any pilferable items such as Weber BBQs, generators and the like – just in case.

SPACE

We’ve free-camped just out of Longreach where it was cheek to jowl, but elsewhere where neighbours could barely be seen or heard. There are no allotted places, so you need to arrive early to secure the best spots and you can’t complain about who camps next door with their drunken mates or babies.

OBLIGATIONS

The basic rule pf free camping is to leave no trace. Not even your grey, waste water. So, carry large black garbage bags for all your rubbish, use a grey water tank or jerry can to capture all your waste water, and leave the place like you would like to have found it.

In National Parks these aren’t requests; they are rules!

PETS

In most cases, you can take your pet dog, budgie or whatever to a free-camp, whereas you’ll be less successful in the majority of regular caravan parks.

EQUIPMENT

If you’re buying a new caravan, or refurbishing an old one, fit a grey water tank to store your sink or shower water. We even use our grey water tank to capture this waste on overnight stops when we use regular caravan parks, as it saves time uncoiling and then coiling-up up a dirty waste hose.

We then ‘waste’ this otherwise relatively inoffensive water at a convenient spot, not next to flowing water or public areas. Many of the half-starved roadside plants accept it gratefully!

You should also have enough battery and/or solar power to run your fridge and water pump for a day or two without 240-volt assistance – something most caravans and campers boast these days – but forget about air conditioning unless you carry a generator. If you do, check the signs, because many areas don’t allow them.

Finally ensure that you have enough gas in your bottle(s) and enough fresh water in your tank(s), as these are often not available either.

HOW TO FIND FREE CAMPS

If you go online you’ll find many sites such as this listing free camps. Just punch ‘free camping’ into your search engine and they’ll all come up.

Or you can purchase the popular and excellent Camps Australia Wide 9 book or App to guide you to them.

But perhaps the best advice comes from caravan or travellers’ forums, because that’s where you’ll find the very latest information of their condition, what’s open and what’s closed.

So, go to a free camp and ask around where other travellers have come from and where they have stayed along the way…