Perth to Darwin via the Coral Coast and the Kimberley - maui

Eleven nights and 5,008 kilometres from Perth to Darwin in a campervan, up the Western Australian coast and across the Kimberley.

Geraldton comes first up the coast, then Monkey Mia in Shark Bay, where wild dolphins have come into the shallows to be fed under supervision for decades, and Carnarvon and Exmouth, the latter the base for Ningaloo, a fringing reef that runs for 260 kilometres and sits close enough to shore to be swum to off the beach.

Karijini turns the route inland, a national park in the Hamersley Range where gorges cut narrow and deep into banded iron rock two billion years old and the pools at the bottom hold water year round. Port Hedland and Broome follow on the coast, then the Kimberley by way of Fitzroy Crossing, Halls Creek and Kununurra, red sandstone country with the Bungle Bungle range and Lake Argyle nearby, before Katherine and Darwin.

The camper and the day-by-day plan come from maui, 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. Twelve days for five thousand kilometres is a serious schedule and the driving is most of the holiday. The dry season from May to October is the window, since the wet closes roads across the north. Several of the best side trips here, the inner gorges at Karijini and the Bungle Bungles among them, need unsealed or four-wheel drive access, so the hire terms are worth reading before counting on them. Whale sharks visit Ningaloo between March and July, which is the one date in the year worth planning the trip around.