24 through 28 March 2025
This post isn’t about the wonderful things I’ve seen lately. No cool photos. Just an accounting of how shit can happen at any time.
The main backstory is that auto registration and documentation is a lot stricter in Australia than in the US. Because my Land Cruiser is more than 5 years old it has to have a safety inspection every year before registration. I knew the registration was coming up but didn’t realize I was going to need an inspection by a licensed inspection station. So, I’m in the middle of nowhere, serious outback in Western Australia (WA), and my registration is from the state of New South Wales (NSW). So I called them to see how to manage. I was told that I can get it inspected in WA but I have to mail the original copy of the inspection report to NSW. But then when she checked a little closer, it turned out that there was a problem. When they did the suspension upgrades the car was “engineered” and the report filed with NSW. Anytime you make a big change to a vehicle it has to be checked by an engineer. I guarantee you that a lot of the cars routinely running around Santa Fe would fail the engineering report. Anyway, mine was filed but I should have taken the original copy to an NSW office and done a change report. That has to be done in person. I had a few options but the only ones that I considered were sending the report and an official letter giving someone else permission and then they could go to an office in person and take care of it. I thought of a couple of people who might do that but just wasn’t really comfortable asking them to do so. Plus, time was kind of running short. From where I was, it would have taken at least a day and a half to drive somewhere and get everything straight and in the mail. Then a few days mail transit and then I had to hope that my designated person would go right away. If it’s late, I’m without registration and therefore without insurance until it’s done and registered. So I decided on option 2: Drive all the way to NSW and take care of it myself. That was a 3500 km drive. And I did it in 3 ½ days. That would be some driving in the US but it was really something in Australia. The first day a lot of the roads were unsealed. Then almost all tarmac but all 2 lane roads with maximum speeds of 110 kph and bunches of roadtrains on the roads. (Wait for another blog post and I’ll tell you about roadtrains.) Almost every night I was setting up camp in the dark. But I made it by Thursday night so I could get things done on Friday, before the weekend. A bunch of glitches along the way but I got it done.
This is an accounting of the trip. Start to Finish.
I left the place where I was bush camped along the (almost dry) Murchison River at around 1:00 PM. I’d spent the morning figuring out what was needed and contemplating my different options for fixing the problem. Drove for a couple of hours to the Mullewa Post Office to check on a package I was expecting. It wasn’t there but that’s a whole other story and I’ll just let it go. Then I drove on to another bush camp at the Xantippe Water Tank. I didn’t get in until well after dark. This was mostly on tarmac but it’s disconcerting to drive after dark for fear of a kangaroo jumping out in front of you. If you want details of the drive, you’ll have to look it up on Google maps but it was 417 km.
The next morning I got up pretty early but spent time checking the car and adding air to my tires. When I bought new tires they didn’t put enough air in them and I knew that it’d make a difference for long days on tarmac. So I drove to the Balladonia Road House for dinner and a beer. Camping at the Road House didn’t appeal to me so I drove on, about 40 km, in the dark, to a roadside overnight spot. I pulled in kind of late and just set things up and went to bed. In the morning, when I could see the surroundings; there were about a dozen of us camped in the roadside stop. Most of the others were folks in caravans. It was about 910 km that day.
Coffee and a little breakfast and on the road again. This is the start of the longest straight road in Australia. Driving on there are actually some pretty nice views and scenery. I stopped at the WA – SA border to fix myself some lunch and get rid of the few veggies I had left in my fridge. There isn’t a quarantine point here when headed east but heading west you have to stop to get searched for veggies before entering WA. Then it was a drive across the Nullarbor and along the cliffs overlooking the Great Australian Bight. This is a pretty desolate area but with it’s own real beauty. Not a lot of traffic but not a desolate drive either. Coming into Ceduna, in the dark, I hit the quarantine station and was “inspected” for fruit and veg. I knew it was coming so had already thrown the little that I had away. Camped for the night at the Ceduna Foreshore Caravan Park. This wasn’t cheap and got high ratings on WikiCamps but it was one of my least favorite camp sites. Parked up close to everyone else and lots of caravans. Kind of like camping in a WalMart parking lot when it’s full of shoppers. 960 km for the day.
Got up early the next morning planning to get rolling for a long hard day. But when I was packed up, coffee made and ready to go the “radio” in my car went south. It was playing really loud and I couldn’t turn the volume down and it was beeping constantly. I thought I might be able to fix it but after close to an hour of dinking around, no luck. So I unplugged it, went to get fuel, and headed out. So now I’ve got no music to drive by. The “radio” is a head unit that we put in when I added all of the interior upgrades. It’s a Chinese branded Android unit with a pretty large screen. I liked the Android setup because I can play my own music, load map programs, and a few other useful things. But this one had been giving me intermittent problems from the get go. And all of the documentation get’s the Nikita Award for being poorly translated from the Chinese. I suspect that it was defective from the start with an intermittent defect. So in some ways having it finally fail is kind of a relief. I haven’t yet decided what I’ll do about replacing it but that can wait. Anyway, the day’s drive was quite varied. A lot of grain farming and then some drive along the water – Port Augusta. Then into the Murray River area which is a major agricultural area with fruit orchards and lots of vineyards. I made it to the Mildura Buronga Discovery Parks caravan park well after dark. That was about 1010 km for the day.
That got me to Friday morning and my first task was to go to a car wash and hose the Troop Carrier off. It was covered in red dust. Then to the mechanic to get inspected. There were some glitches here but in the end I got the inspection paperwork and took it along with the information from the suspension upgrade to the Service NSW office and after a little work and online searching by the woman in the office I completed everything, paid my registration fee and now I’m all legal. It was a real ordeal but in the end I’m happy to be done with it and relieved of the stress.
That’s the end of that story. I’ve got a few interesting posts to make of things I did a few weeks ago and I’ll see when I can get to them. Now I’ll take care of a few things around here, like cleaning up some stuff (there’s still a bit of red dust in the Troopy) and I’ll start a somewhat slower return to WA.