trackOverland - Australia to Europe

Lachstock

Member
Hello Expo!

I have been reading heaps of the travel reports on here for many years of which many helped form the realisation we should be out there doing this as well!

So I thought I'd add our own to share our big overland trip.

So what started with a bit of a beer dream has turned into a full blown reality. About two years ago we were living in Austria and I was planning in my spare time at work a rough idea of a drive back home to Australia. My partner initially thought I was crazy but overtime the idea slowly grew on her. Fast forward to today and we’ve just completed the first leg of our trip, a 16,000km lap of Australia!


View on Google Maps

Australia? That’s right! Somewhere in our initial planning stages I let the allure of a career get in the way of a good adventure and we chose to move back to Australia for a new job. After slowly coming to the realisation that this was in fact the stupidest decision we could have made, we got to work on our escape plan. We started saving all that we could and selling as many of our worldly possessions as Gumtree would accept and packed our life into the Troopy ready for an overland journey back to Europe!

I also spent most of the year renovating our Troopy to be how we wanted it to be! You can check that our here in my rough build thread: here

The total plan looks like this, head north then west..

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So after a lot of mucking around and a rushed as hell last day we were off, we'd done a lot of trips in western Vic so we wanted to get outside the areas we'd been to many times before. We made a good run north on the first day and were rewarded with a PERFECT first camp site on the Murray River in South Australia.

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Sunset on the Murray.

We headed north up through the Flinders Ranges where we caught up with my parents who had come down from the North to meet us there. We spend a couple of days doing the walks around Wilpena Pound before heading onto the Oodnadatta Track.

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The Flinders are an amazing place to visit.

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Heading North to Oodnadatta.

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Camping on Mars/Oodnadatta track. (and pissing rain!)

We were actually really lucky to get through to William Creek due to heavy rain in the area. We were cutoff from going further than William Creek and had to head west to Coober Pedy to avoid getting rained in! There were a lot of people waiting it out to try and get through but we wanted to get north to the warmth! We headed north for Uluru where there's not a whole lot to see along the road from Coober Pedy to Alice Springs!

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Amazing camp spot on a sand dune just outside the Uluru national park, that's Ayers Rock and the Olgas in the distance!

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The Olgas, pics really don't do this joint justice. It is truly awe inspiringly large!

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We were also lucky enough to be there when it was storming, incredibly rare even to see water running off Ayers Rock!

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Kings Canyon.

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Camping at the West McDonnell Ranges outside Alice Springs.

We had a few days in Alice as we blew our AC compressor somewhere on the last 2,500km of dirt roads. It was pretty important that we rectified this before heading further north where the average day temp was to be over 40 degrees Celsius. Once we were sorted and now in possession of a gold plated AC compressor (it was ridiculously expensive) installed before we once again headed north for the Tanami!

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Some looong straight roads out there!

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Amazing campsite along the Tanami, shelter and water and in the middle of absolutely nowhere!

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Crossing the NT/WA border, not a lot of festivities..

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Some local feral wildlife.

It was a looong straight road in parts, something that was a little disappointing was that the Tanami is often touted as quite the adventurous drive so we were prepared for a multi day slog to get across. It actually turned out to be an almost perfect graded road all the way through so we made fairly light work of it! If it rained it would have been a total **** show though..

We went past Wolfe creek at the end and managed to not get Murdered as well!

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Laundry day on the Tanami.

After a week or so of HOT DRY travelling we made a run for Broome to see the Sea again! We ended up staying there for a few days to recuperate a bit before heading on to the Kimberly and across the Gibb River Road for the next couple of weeks.

The Gibb and the Kimberly was our main destination for our Australia leg and it did not disappoint.

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In Tunnel Creek at the start of the Gibb.

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Our camp on Dog Chain creek, a wonderful spot!

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Beautiful gorges everywhere in the Kimberly and in september/october there was nobody around!

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The time of year we were there we'd often have these Gorges to ourselves all day!

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More private waterholes :)

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Striking the explorer pose while hiking up to El Questro Gorge.

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Swimming after the long hike to El Questro Gorge!

I'll add a few more pics from our run across the North and up to Cape York then down to Brisbane where we put the car in the container for its voyage to Cambodia!

Hope you like the pics!

Cheers,

Lachlan
 
Last edited:

Latetom

Observer
Thank you for the photos -- it reminded me of just how great a time we had in Australia in 2016.

We land in Sydney (after a month in Japan) in June, 2016 and two weeks later had picked up our Toyota 4Runner from the port (shipped from Los Angles, CA), two grand boys (flew to Sydney from Denver, CO), and began our drive up the east coast. Boys went home after seeing the Great Barrier Reef. We then drove Karumba, Boojamulla Nat'l Park, Tennant Creek, Alice Springs, Kings Canyon, Uluru-Kata Tjuta Nat'l Park, Mataranka, Katherine/Nitmiluk Nat'l Park, Kakadu Nat'l Park, Darwin, Litchfield Nat'l Park, Timber Creek & Gregory Nat'l Park, Kununurra & Keep River Nat'l Park, Wyndham & Parry Lagoos Nature Reserve, Purnulul Nat'l Park, Halls Creek, Mimibi Caves, Broome to Perth to Esperance to Flinders Range to Adelaide to Melbourne ferry to Tasmania for 2.5 weeks ferry to Melbourne to Adelaide then wife flew home for six weeks and I drove Adelaide to Darwin by way of Oodnadatta Track & another visit to Alice, Katherine, Kakadu Nat'l Park and finally Darwin. This was 5.5 months of the best time in our lives.

Next was Indonesia for three weeks and then Singapore where we picked up the 4Runner. Then Malaysia and flew to Cambodia then shipped the 4runner to Calcutta where we began a six month driver through NE India, Nepal, NW India and finally Mumbai where we put the 4Runner on a ship to Genoa, Italy. Spent 6+ week in Italy, parked the 4Runner and flew home, and can't wait to fly back to Rome at the end of Jan. and drive some more.

I like your itinerary from Cambodia to Mongolia (avoids Thailand and their new law on import and drivers). How are you going to handle the requirement for a Chinese driver in China? Are you going to caravan with others or have you lined up a travel company to provide you with a driver? We still hope to drive Mongolia but drive from Turkey to Mongolia and back in 2020 (we dream big but are also currently almost 68 & 70 -- reality will set in someday).

Look forward to more photographs!
 

Lachstock

Member
Hi Latetom!

That sounds like an epic Aus lap you did! We will be doing a whole lot more once we're back here as well. We just let the departure slip a bit and the timing to hit Mongolia in May kept it short unfortunately...

I like your itinerary from Cambodia to Mongolia (avoids Thailand and their new law on import and drivers). How are you going to handle the requirement for a Chinese driver in China? Are you going to caravan with others or have you lined up a travel company to provide you with a driver? We still hope to drive Mongolia but drive from Turkey to Mongolia and back in 2020 (we dream big but are also currently almost 68 & 70 -- reality will set in someday).

For China you don't need a driver, just a guide. They now organise a temporary drivers license and rego for the crossing so you can drive yourself (with a guide along with you). We're going to be a group of three vehicles which we found using the overland Asia facebook group. So we're sharing the cost of the guide between three groups which brings down the cost substantially compare to going it alone! It was a real shame about Thailand changing the rules, our original plan was to go up through Malaysia to Thailand then on as we planned.. but oh well!
 

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