Wool Wagon Pathway 4WD - Britz

Five nights and 1,600 kilometres from Geraldton to Exmouth in a 4WD camper, inland on the Wool Wagon Pathway and out to the Ningaloo coast.

The pathway follows the routes the wool carts took from the Murchison and Gascoyne stations down to the ports, and the country it crosses is pastoral rather than scenic in the conventional sense: red earth, low scrub, windmills, and a homestead every hundred kilometres or so.

Pindar comes first, east of Geraldton, where in a good year the wreath flowers grow along the road verges in rings a metre across and appear almost nowhere else on earth. The Murchison follows, a shire the size of a small country with a population in the low hundreds, then Gascoyne Junction, and the route drops to the coast at Exmouth and Cape Range National Park, where the gorges run down to Ningaloo Reef and the snorkelling at Turquoise Bay starts a few metres off the sand.

Britz supply the camper and the day-by-day plan, and the hire is priced live per vehicle rather than per person; campsites, fuel, ferries, park fees and activities are all extra, with a nil-excess insurance pack available at booking. The pathway is unsealed for long stretches and the station tracks need care after rain, so this is a dry weather route. Fuel and water want planning around the gaps rather than the distances. What it offers is a crossing of pastoral Western Australia that almost no visitor makes, finishing at one of the best reefs in the country.