Dark. Cold. No coffee. Nowhere near enough sleep. But the bags were packed, the tickets were paid for and we’d all done the 5:15 am run for the airport before. And we’d be warm and toasty by the days end.
We were off to Kununurra.
The plan was to meet up with family that were already going to be there as part of a multi-month expedition across the heart of Australia and we would tag along for a couple of weeks to see three National Parks in two states that we’d not been able to properly get to grips with on our last visit to the area back in 2004.
Like all good plans, this one struggled to survive contact with reality. Meeting up with Team Mother, Team Uncle and Team Legal required them and us being in Kununurra, Western Australia on a specific date (organised months in advance) without fail as they towed with them much of our accommodation and accoutrements of comfort.
We had to find a date in busy airline schedules near to school holidays where three separate flights would align to get the three of us from one side of the continent to the other in one day…and back again two weeks later. That was sorted so the Ground Teams finally had a target.
And they nailed it. But at considerable cost.
The Ground Teams were doing the Binns Track which is a conceptual trail ‘constructed’ by the Northern Territory using existing roads, tracks and stock routes and intended to provide an alternative, exploratory route from South to North across the NT for those not content with bombing up the bitumen. It runs from Mt Dare in the south to Timber Creek in the north and traverses some 2,300 kilometres of often pretty rough track. And to get to Mt. Dare, one must traverse the Oodnadatta Track and much of South Australia’s fine desert country first. So they had set themselves some fun.
Team Mother was driving a Land Rover Discovery 4 and towing a Complete Campsite Exodus 9 camper. Team Uncle was driving a Nissan Navara and hauling a Vista RV Crossover XL camper. Team Legal was driving a Toyota Prado and hauling a Complete Campsite Jabiru camper. Essentially, three capable 4x4s hauling camper trailers weighing about 1,200 to 1,500 kgs dry. All well set up for the journey in front of them.
The GT’s had given themselves a very, very relaxed itinerary to do the Binns as opposed to the mad ten days suggested by the NT Tourism mob. Which turned out to be very handy when it all started going awry.
Team Uncle was the first to go when they grounded the Navara’s sump on a rock out near the Davenport Ranges which punched a nice hole straight through the pressed metal. Some synthetic metal bondo reduced the damage sufficiently to get the Navara parked up in a safe camp for a few days while arrangements were made to get a new sump to Alice Springs from Melbourne and then out to the Navara. Three days later they were back underway.
Team Legal suffered the next incident. The rough roads taxed the decade old suspension of their camper to the point where one of the two dampers on the offside split in two. As this camper uses a trailing arm coil suspension system that uses the dampers both as a keeper for the spring and way of aligning the trailing arm…the damaged damper had to be augmented with a ratchet strap whilst waiting for a new damper to be sent from Brisbane. The decision was made to have the damper sent to Kununurra where the Team could fit it at their leisure. The damper arrived in just two days. The strap only just survived the journey there.
The killer incident happened to Team Mother. Somewhere out there in the desert between Mt. Dare and Tennant Creek, most likely at one of the many washout or creek crossings, the D4 took a solid smack to the rear diff casing. This resulted in a crack in the casing through which the D4 lost differential oil at an apparently undetectable rate. Eventually, once the GT’s got back on the tar near Tennant Creek and were on their way to the dirt on the west side of the Stuart Highway, the rear diff dismantled itself. Land Rover Assist came to the rescue and the D4 was sent to Darwin for repair while the Exodus 9 camper was put on a truck to Kununurra.
All this happened days before we’d even got on the plane on that cold, dark winter morning. In the days that followed, the GT’s made their way to Kununurra and set themselves up just 48 hours before we arrived. Replacement rental vehicles for the D4 had been organised and plans were re-drawn again for our arrival and the organisation of the next two weeks. It was going to happen, no matter what.
Landing in Melbourne in the pre-dawn light saw us in a mildly urgent scramble for a decent cup of coffee during our transfer onto the 4.5 hour cross country punt to Darwin and a surprisingly edible airline breakfast of scrambled not eggs, bacon, baked beans and sausage. Cloud over the bottom half of the continent and a wing side seat meant desert views were at a premium.
Landing in Darwin is always a shock. Weird tropical light, Dry Season smoke, heat haze and military aircraft conspired to create a very unfamiliar air for the average southerners like us. The snatched smack of heat and humidity that you get on the air bridge between the air conditioned environments of plane and terminal sets a tone of foreboding for winterised bodies. We sat down to wait a couple of hours for our connection to Kununurra in an over-crowded terminal comforted only by $10 egg and lettuce sandwiches and the knowledge that it would only be a 50 minute flight.
When we finally loaded up onto the Embraer jet for the parabola to Kununurra we embraced the tropical heat laden with the smell of unburnt jet fuel during the tarmac walk to the plane. In no time at all we jumped across the Joesph Bonaparte Gulf into the almost foreign and yet strangely familiar landscape of north-eastern Western Australia and into the embrace of the GT’s.
We were on. And good to go. It hadn’t all gone to plan but…oh well. We had Keep River, Judbara/Gregory and Purnululu in our sights and that was all that really mattered.
To Be Continued…