The 1986 Holden Calais we used for our first Australia tour.
Introduction to the Australia tour |
Although the trip around Australia is 25,000 km (15,000 miles), when taken in short segments of about 300 km a day, with rest breaks of a few days at places that take your fancy, it's a relaxing yet exciting adventure Australia tour. The road is highway standard right around, and you can plug into electric power mains at every stop. So you have all the comforts of home, with many Van Parks providing shower and toilet facilties right at your site (called ensuite sites).
The car shown above is a 1986 Holden sedan, with a 6 cylinder 3 litre engine and automatic transmission. The caravan is only 12ft 6ins in length overall, and weighs about one ton loaded. This rig is quite satisfactory for such a long trip. So if your family car is in this bracket, then all you need is a similar sized van and a few accessories which I'll mention later. For overseas visitors to Australia, the Around OZ trip can be made by leasing a rental car and a van.
Although it may seem a trivial matter, the direction to tour around Australia during your Australia tour is a critical issue. In a nutshell, you go around anti-clockwise. Why is this critical?
Because you take advantage of the prevailing winds, which will be East to South-Easterly when driving up the east coast - Easterly when travelling westwards across the top of the continent - North-Westerly when driving south down Western Australia, and generally of a Westerly component when finally heading east from Perth towards the East coast.
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Just consider heading the other way around. You are bucking into a 15 kph wind as you drive from, say Mount Isa eastwards towards Julia Creek. Your safe travel speed will be about 80 kph, so your fuel consumption goes way up due to the headwind. Your transmission and engine would probably start to overheat.
If you were travelling in the other direction, you would have a 15 kph tail wind helping you along, and your fuel consumption would be down below the average for the trip. The overall fuel consumption for a six cylinder car pulling a one ton loaded van anticlockwise around OZ, would be about 17 miles per (Imp.) gallon (16.5 litres per 100 km). Going the other way around it would increase to about 14 mpg or 20 litres per 100 km. The map below shows the route, generally referred to as Highway One.
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