The Trip

I’m pretty happy with the route for days 1 to 10, though I’ll wait for some feedback from friends who know some of the roads better than me (or at all), and adjust them as I go.

But Day 11 is where it will start to get tricky. It’s 250km to Barunga on what becomes the Central Arnhem Road, and the bitumen runs out about 20km after that. It’s not a full day’s ride to Barunga, obviously, but it’s also hard to tell how far we’d make it past that.

One option would be to make Barunga the destination for the day anyway. That would give us an easier day’s ride, give us time to check out Alice Springs a little, and possibly give us a chance to prepare the bikes for the long dirt ride to Lake Evella and Nhulunbuy. It’s about 500km from Barunga to Lake Evella, but I’m guessing that will take more than a day to do. If that’s the case, it puts us Lake Evella sometime on Day 13 – over half our likely distance in less than our total time. Here’s a map of the 3 days.

Hopefully we can get a few days in Lake Evella to meet the locals and catch up with old friends. How long we get will depend on the route we take home. Or perhaps it’s the other way around – the route back will depend on how long we choose to stay.

There’s still lots to work out. We’ll need permits to enter some areas, even up to this point. If we can’t refuel in Lake Evella, then the nearest listed fuel is Nhulunbuy, 220km further north and east. Can we make it from Lake Evella to Darwin, or do we have to head back down the Central Arnhem Road? Do we skip Darwin altogether, and concede that we can fly there another time?

My gut feel is that we’ll head back to the Stuart Hwy roughly the way we came, and follow it all the way south, through Coober Pedy and Woomera, then head home over Port Augusta. Once back on the tarmac we could get home in around a week, though that would be a hard ride. Here’s a rough map of the return trip, though the actual daily destinations are just place-holders for now.

But if that meant we had a week (or near enough to it) in and around Lake Evella, it just might be worth it. I’ll update the main route page when I get this settled in my head.