imi

Hi. I'm planning a trip from Perth to Darwin (or vice versa) along the coast.
I'm reckoning on going slow (2 months sometime between november and march (I have to take my vacation during these months).
Any suggestions as to which 2 month period would be "best"? weather, wind direction etc. I'd prefer to head north (to be on the sea-side of the road) but not if this entails constant headwinds
Thanks for any advice

maha

Wow, that's going to be an amazing trip! I stayed for five weeks in Darwin six years ago, loved it! Wish I could go back sometime but it's a long way from Finland to Australia...

hardtail

I've driven this route. Pretty barren for long stretches. Be sure to take a detour into the Pilbara. Beautiful area. Kakadu south of Darwin also is great.

Maybe consider some other means of transport for some stretches. Scenery really doesn't change much and if you've got just two months then it would be a shame to miss Pilbara, Shark Bay, Coral Bay, Kakadu etc. just because you have to push on and don't have time for detours.

Btw have you been south of Perth? Margaret River, Augusta, Cape Leeuwin, Albany. Great area.

imi

Thanks! Great tips... Maybe I'll twist my boss's arm to get an extra month off, spend more time making detours... don't want to rush
hardtail, do you have an online journal of your trip? I haven't been south of Perth, looks beautiful down there

porter

Its pretty warm in Darwin all year round but Nov-Mar is commonly referred to as the wet season in the top end and about 80-90% of the yearly rainfall falls during these months. It will be pretty hot (ave daily temps around 30C) and sticky and it won't cool down much at night in the northern areas. To be honest it's probably not the best time of year to go touring but if I had to fit two months in during this period I would probably start from Perth in Nov. I think this will give you a tail wind (though not positive), some nice riding temperatures to start with and it will be relatively dry in the WA section.

June to August would be a better time of year to do some riding in this part of the world...

mev

Here is a link to the Australian Bureau of Meterology: https://www.bom.gov.au/climate/averages/

Click on something like "Temperature percentiles" and you can make your own variations of maps. As mentioned above, November to March is the wet season and can be a bit hot:
https://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/climat...percentile.cgi
and wet:
https://www.bom.gov.au/jsp/ncc/climat...oduct=2mm#maps
as well as a bit humid:
https://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/climat...ps_newlook.cgi

The wind roses:
https://www.bom.gov.au/climate/averag...d/wrsum3.shtml
would suggest slightly better going from Perth (however, in my experience cycling from Darwin to Perth between July/September it was pretty variable).

Clarenza

November to March? Awful timing! Whole sections of road sometimes get washed away in the Territory during the big wet -- this season hundreds of metres got washed out on the Stuart Highway south of Darwin. Some German tourers who had stayed with us got through just before this happened.

You may be interested in a book called Shimmering Spokes by Richard Allen. He circumnavigated Australia (anticlockwise) and while it was a big learning experience for him (that's code for he made a LOT of bad choices) at least he did the Darwin to Perth leg in the dry winter months (July to September). I note you're planning on the coastal route and Allen provides a compelling commentary on why not to take a short cut along the Gibb River Road, especially with a support vehicle towing a caravan!!

cycotourer

This is the very worst time of year to consider this trip.

My son worked as a helicopter pilot in Kununurra, and the summer across the Kimberley region is very hot. He did not fly at all during the wet season.

His comment when he first started flying in northern Australia was " well I can tell you what I've seen ... absolutely, blo*dy nothing". In other words while the scenery is tremendous, there is no civilisation. You can fly for hours and see nothing and no-one. Hours in a helicopter is days on a bike. There will be light traffic on the roads, but no tourists, and the roads can be flooded and cut-off in the wet. (Towns in northern Queensland, on the Gulf, have been cut-off for over a month and are likely to be isolated by flood waters for at least another 6 weeks.)

My son spent about 5 years in Darwin where the temp hovers at 33 degrees pretty much year round. November is the "build-up" to the wet, no relief from the heat and everyone goes "troppo" ... bad tempered and crime rates soar.

He now lives in Katherine, south of Darwin where it is frequently around 38 - 40 degrees through summer. I think it was about 42 on the November day he first moved to Katherine 2 years ago.

This region flooded very badly during Dec/Jan this year. He sent me photos of washed out highways and a road train with water up to the top of its roof. Trying to ride a bike through the top end's build up or wet season will be very unpleasant.

Last October we warm shower hosted some German cyclists who rode from Sydney to Darwin. I suggested they not attempt the Rockhampton to Darwin leg through the summer and the wet season. They said they had been told that the wet season just involved some afternoon thunderstorms!!! Try tropical low pressure systems that develop into cyclones and many days of constant torrential rain. (This is not just the top end region but potentially anywhere along the northern coast of WA.)

The Germans recently e-mailed us from Darwin to say they had to do lot of hitching as the cycling conditions were just not tolerable. These were not babes in the woods cyclists either, they had already toured much of Central and South America.

I don't mean to put you off, this is a route I will ride myself, but not from November to March in either direction.

BTW the locals call Kakadu Kakadon't. Litchfield is more accessible and offers similar "sights" in a smaller area, closer to Darwin. Having said that I am still going to do Kakadu myself! :-)

Have a great ride, be careful with the planning, especially where to get water, and be prepared to have to buy it. Its not fair to beat up local business owners for not providing free water when they may very well have had to buy a tank of water for their own use and truck it in at huge expense.

Sorry this is so long, just want to make sure you don't have a terrible experience. Try to convince your boss to let you have time off through winter when the temps and precipitation will be kinder.

imi

Thanks everyone for your comments! I'm going to do some long hard thinking about this, maybe even rethink the whole tour to another continent. Unfortunately as I work at a campsite in Sweden I can't get vacation time in the NH summer which is our high-season... so where to ride for a couple of months Nov-Mar? *headscratching* a 3000-3500 km straight route would give me time for detours and resting. A very important part of my travelling is sleeping outside, either campsites or just in a sleeping bag along the way... falling asleep under the stars and waking up covered in dew... oh yeah and long coastal stretches

hardtail

Hi Imi,

I have to disagree with some of the information in the last 2 posts. IMO starting in Perth (or better yet Albany) around Christmas time and finishing up in Darwin at the end of March sounds like perfect timing. You'll get the benefits of Summer in southern WA and it'll be the end of the wet in northern WA and NT where it's always hot. Also, northern WA and NT is more scenic after the wet. That's what I've been told by "Territorians" who couldn't understand what the hell I was doing there as a tourist right in the middle of the dry. Also, southern WA is pretty cold and wet in July/August.

If I were doing this trip again (driving, cycling, whatever) it would be from Early new year starting in Southern WA and working my way up to NT to get there by April.

Cyotourer is exactly correct the there is a quip Kakadon't Litchfield do. I've been to both and I can assure you that Kakadu is fantastic and for me way better than Litchfield. Accessibility in my view is also better at Kakadu.

Don't be put off going to Oz. It's truly a fantastic country. Great scenery, great people, great weather, pretty good booze, Ok food, amazing wildlife. The list goes on.

Btw I don't have an online journal of my trip by I'm sure there are many on the web.

Finally, want to echo Clarenza's comments re Gibb River Road. It's remote, rough an would be difficult to cycle in the middle of the dry, almost impossible and certainly unpleasant in the or shortly after the wet.

Good luck with your tour. Make it at least 3 months and definitely go to Oz!

Edited to add don't stick to a completely coastal route. It would be a big shame not to visit the Pilbara

Sam Tully

Wow, The time of year you have chosen will be hot but this will off set some of the best sunsets you will ever see my friend. I have done this stretch of coast in about the same length of time in my camper and will be back soon to do it by bike. I have a friend that has just done this and the way he got around the heat was to cycle from 2am to 9am and rest the hole day through reading,sleeping or chatting to passers by, this time of day may seem obsurd but you will see more widlife in these times than you can poke a stick at.
But at the end of the day, do what your body tells you to do, drink plenty of fluids and be prepared to talk forever about your trip once you have finished as my friend will never forget his .
ENJOY
The biggesst fear of travel is not to travel at all.

Clarenza

The Perth-Darwin trip is a fair bit longer than your 3,000 to 3,500km objective. Depending on route, Perth to Darwin is 4,100 to 4,450km (but forget the 4,100, that's via Gibb River Road). So say you do 90km per day, it's going to take about 50 days. If you cycle say 5 days a week, that's 2.5 months. If it were possible to extend your vacation so that you finish in Darwin say mid April, the last two weeks / 900km (Kununurra to Darwin) could be sufficiently late in the wet season that you'd be OK, though you'd still be doing the Kimberley's (between Broome and Kununurra) in the tail end of the wet season (the wet is an issue in the tropics, especially above Broome (18 degrees south) from December to March). Finishing at the end of April would be way better, especially if you want to allow time to do Kakadu. As hardtail says, it would be better to allow three months for the trip of this length, to allow more time to see the sights, but that may mean a pretty hot start in Perth.

With a 2.5 month schedule, a mid April finish would have you leaving Perth early February. Maybe it's global warming or just an annual cycle but Perth has had some hot summers lately, with many days this year in the mid to high 30s (and, watching the weather maps, most days even in the first half of Feb seem to have been over 30c). So the start of the trip could be pretty warm but probably OK, depending on how quickly you can adjust from a Swedish winter to an Aussie summer So again, a mid Feb departure / end April arrival would be better than earlier. I would not agree with hardtail that you leave Perth around Christmas -- unless it's a much milder summer (or you grew up in the tropics) you'd probably find it very hard going.

The east coast of Australia is another option for you. Like Perth, Victoria in the south east has had a very hot summer this year (you may have heard about the bushfires in early Feb). The New South Wales coast has been hot but not so bad. A trip from Melbourne to Cairns in Queensland (which is roughly the same latitude as Broome) is about 3,000km and would be a very nice tour. Certainly a thousand times more to see, though more than 1000 times more traffic than the WA coast. The east coast beaches are spectacular and there's no shortage of places to stay. The south east and east coast are where most Australians live.

A few more random thoughts:

• Cairns has an international airport.
• The far north coast of Queensland also gets very wet but unlike the north west's monsoonal wet season (in the area west of the dividing range running down the east coast of the country) it is a wet tropics climate, so while it has a wet season, the rainfall is more spread throughout the year.
• If you're here in the summer, you may also want to consider Tasmania, the beautiful island state off the south coast of the mainland, much cooler. But 3000km? You'd need to circumnavigate it a few times

imi

Thank you all for your replies! I will think hard and long about this now, 3 months is not impossible, and I really don't want to rush... I haven't ever had problems riding in southern Europe with heat in the 35-40 C range, though I was in Queensland a couple of years ago (not on my bike) and I experienced the sun as being much more aggressive and I will have the utmost respect for this factor in planning the trip... hihi coming from Sweden in the middle of our winter to the tropics is a huge sweaty change (up to 50 degree C rise!) but to be honest I've always preferred that than going the other way.. *brrrrr*

Tajrossi3

I've ridden most parts of Australia. Best to ride Darwin to Perth between April and August. The road is good and safe and although there are some long stretches between food & water you only need about 2 days supply and can bot off all the greybeards in vans out there!
Don't ride up North during the wet season (summer). Most tourers fully loaded-average about 125Km per day and have a rest day once per week

aroundoz

I road the perimeter in 01-02 and the section between Darwin and Perth was my favorite. You would be going the right direction to have the wind at your back but like others said, you would need a boat to get there. I really think finishing in Darwin in March would still be pushing it. Broome is about a month away from Darwin, on a bike and taking your time, which means you would be in the north during February. I am not a local but still think you would have more than your share of unpleasant days due to the rain and humidity.

If you have ruled out Perth to Darwin during those months, but haven't ruled out Australia, you might want to consider flying to Melbourne, doing Tasmania for about a month, then head north and finish in Sydney or Brisbane. You wouldn't see the desert but you would still be in some great parts of the country during the right time of the year. Saying Tasmania is fantastic is an understatement. If you don't mind riding on dirt, the snowy river area NE of Melbourne is great. Then head up the interior through the Great Dividing Range. The east coast is nice but I quickly got my fill of beaches and drunken backpackers which is why I would go more inland.

I hope you don't mind the suggestion. I just wanted to give you an option which would work with your schedule.



Having said that, you could still have an excellent trip in Australia during would never ride the east coast again unless I stayed well inland. Too many cars and tourists mostly consisting of young adults who are looking for another country to get drunk in.