The dirt road caravan dilemma
Should you spend more on an off-road caravan or just stick to the bitumen?COMMENT
When Porsche introduced its Cayenne SUV to Australia in 2003, it boasted with its low-range transmission and steel lower suspension arms that it was a match for Toyota’s redoubtable LandCruiser off-road.
Yet when its second-generation replacement arrived in 2011, the 250kg low-range transfer case was gone, with the former’s six-speed automatic transmission replaced by a new eight-speed auto and more electronic traction ‘smarts’.
The reason? Research had shown that only as few as three per cent of Cayenne owners ventured far enough off the bitumen to justify the cost and extra weight of its serious off-road tech – even in Australia where the original model’s Luxury Car Tax-inflated retail price discouraged most owners from Outback rock-hopping or fording swollen streams.
To a large extent, the same is true of most luxury ‘off-road’ caravans. While this market segment has boomed in COVID-19 times, the majority of these remote area ‘rambos’ can be found in regular caravan parks, National Parks, or ‘free-camping’ within mobile phone range of civilisation.
Too pricey to get dirty
One issue again is price. Few people are comfortable with taking their $100,000-plus ‘off-road’ caravan on the sort of roads where it or its equally pricey tow car could be damaged.
And, as many of the COVID-19 cohort have come to caravanning quite late in their travelling lives without any off-road experience (because they can’t travel overseas), neither they, nor their nervous spouses have sufficient confidence to take their rigs close to their real limits.
At the lower end of the off-road market, slabs of checker-plate body armour, mud tyres, brightly painted independent suspension, big water tanks, battery ‘banks’ and numerous solar panels tell your friends and neighbours that you’re totally at home ‘Outback’.
And because they weren’t out there with you and won’t show them those photos beside the bouncing castle at your local Big 4, you can tell them what you like!
Keep it simple
The truth is that a quite low-spec bitumen caravan can take a first-time caravanner most places around Australia, provided that you have enough ground clearance and you don’t mind taking in a bit of dust. It all depends on how fast and how often you travel on bad unsealed roads.
A few years ago I crossed Australia on a variety of roads – sealed to badly-corrugated/unsealed – from Shark Bay in WA to Byron Bay in NSW – in a convoy of two locally-built Bailey Rangefinder caravans fitted with standard leaf-spring, non-independent suspension and highway 15-inch cross-ply tyres.
No problems at all – not even a puncture – although they shipped in a fair bit of dust!
Not long afterwards I met a guy in an older 1980s caravan at the end of the goat track that leads to Lake Eyre South.
“I just take my time,” he explained, although this is not something we could claim to have done in our trans-Australia Rangefinder trip.
Fewer corrugations to tackle
The other reality is that the bitumen is taking over some of the hallowed, horror-stretch Outback highways, so you may not need a so-called ‘off-road’ caravan after all. Just a well-built one.
Funding has already been approved, or is being spent on sealing sections of the famed Tanami and Strzelecki Tracks; the bitumen is now in place all the way to Cape Leveque, and is creeping along the iconic Gibbs River Road.
The black tar is also creeping along the Oodnadatta Track towards the Pink Roadhouse and the Outback Highway that snakes its way across Australia from Laverton in WA to the food bowl of Queensland’s Tropical North, is ironing out its dusty corrugations, bit by bit.
The first 100 kilometres of the Plenty Highway section from the Stuart Highway to Ongeva Creek is sealed, but if you really want to experience the dust, corrugations and stone chips, the remaining 178 kilometres the fuel stop at Jervois Homestead is still unsealed as is the rest of the track to Boulia. For now.
Slower short-cuts
In fact, you can get most places in Australia without straying off sealed roads. Longer? Yes. Slower? Not necessarily.
One of the best-known ‘short cuts’ is the Tanami Track, which is a much shorter route to the Kimberley and the Gibb River Road via Halls Creek than by following the Stuart up to Katherine, then turning left.
But few caravnners travel at much more than 70km/h on the Tamami, as faster speeds kick up damaging stones and are out of sync with the road’s corrugation, whereas 65km/h seems to be the ‘sweet spot’.
We have friends in Kununurra who travel to Melbourne regularly in their LandCruiser 200 Series without a caravan and have never seriously considered the Tanami alternative.
They cruise the bitumen at 110km/h or more where it’s allowed in the NT, change drivers regularly and never suffer from ‘fuel range-anxiety’, taking three days to do the trips to their apartment in Melbourne’s Southbank. But they might reconsider their route – if the Tanami is ever fully sealed.
Dusty tourist route
Which brings me to the point – few locals – take the rough, dusty, unsealed short cuts – just tourists.
I learned this in Broome when I mentioned to a caravan repair specialist that we were planning to take the Gary Junction Highway from Marble Bar to Alice Springs.
“I wouldn’t,” he advised us earnestly. “It’s even rough for proper off-road camper trailers, let alone caravans.”
He was wrong! The combined Telfer Mine Road that becomes the Gary Junction Highway, turned out to be a better and more interesting unsealed road than many of Australia’s better-known Outback short-cuts.
The truth was, he’d never driven it, instead travelling the bitumen to Katherine, via the Great Northern and Victoria Highways, then heading south.
It you want unsealed adventure roads, the dusty old cattle route now called the Gibb River Road has 660km to entertain you with its gorges, waterfalls, sprawling savannahs and clear starry nights awaits you. But you’ll pay for it, either in the extra money you’ll pay for a true off-road caravan, the tough tow car you’ll need and the cost of the mechanical prep and post-trip servicing both will need.
Many say that part of the appeal of this road is how remote and inaccessible it is, which certainly keeps visitor numbers down to only the most intrepid of adventurers.
Tackle the bumps solo
But here’s another idea from someone who has driven the road three times: Spend less initially and buy a good ‘all-road’ rather than an ‘off-road’ one, relax on the corrugations at someone else’s expense (by booking a 4x4 guided tour to the more remote places that you can only get to via bad unsealed roads), leaving you to enjoy the fabulous scenery and stress-free walks to remote swimming holes and gorges.
The same logic applies to the magnificent Bungle Bungles (Purnululu National Park), north of Hall’s Creek. Leave your van at the Turkey Creek camping ground at the turn-off from the Great Northern Highway and take the 4x4 guided tour from there.
Sadly, no alternative yet for the 16km of unsealed, dusty road into El Questro, 100km off the bitumen west of Kununurra, but take your time, your rig won’t come to any harm and you’ll get a real feeling with all its many walks of what the Kimberley offers, without bouncing any further along the Gibb River Road.
If you’d rather step off the bitumen, Emma Gorge a few kilometres short of El Questro on the right travelling West, is one of the Kimberley’s better walking and swimming gorges and being just off the bitumen, is accessible to all vehicles.
The good news if you want to get to the top of Cape Leveque from Broome, the road is now sealed all the way to One Arm Point, but no such luck if you want to venture up the Kalumburu Road to the Mitchell Plateau and Falls. You might have to cross it off your list for a few years until the road sealers pass through.
So, in short. If you buy a good, solid Australian-built all-road caravan, it will take you to most of the best spots in Outback Australia, although you may have to clock up a few more kilometres compared to the unsealed alternative.
But, if this is your first ‘lap’ of Australia, perhaps an adventure trip with the kids, rest assured that there’ll be plenty to see. And what you miss, you can always pick up on a side trip, see later – either once the blacktop rolls through – or if you ultimately spend a bit more on a serious off-road caravan.
So don’t hold back for the bitumen!
Related:
End of the great Outback track
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