12-day Adelaide to Birdsville Return 4WD itinerary - Britz

Eleven nights and 3,600 kilometres in a loop from Adelaide, driven in a 4WD camper, out to Birdsville and back by the same route.

Melrose comes first, the oldest town in the Flinders Ranges, then Wilpena Pound, a natural amphitheatre of folded rock some eleven kilometres across, high enough to hold its own weather and best seen from the rim walk or from the air. Marree follows at the end of the bitumen, a town that was a camel depot in the nineteenth century and is now the junction of the Oodnadatta and Birdsville tracks.

The Birdsville Track is the point of the trip: around 500 kilometres of unsealed road between Marree and Birdsville across the Tirari and Sturt Stony deserts, laid out as a stock route to move cattle south from Queensland and still carrying very little traffic. Mungerannie is the only fuel stop along it, and the hotel there has a bore-fed wetland behind it. Birdsville itself has a pub, a bakery and a racecourse that fills up once a year.

The return runs back down the track through Mungerannie and Marree, then Port Augusta and Adelaide. 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. This is remote country where a flat tyre matters, and the track closes after rain, so it wants checking before departure rather than on the day. Two spare tyres, more water than seems necessary and a satellite beacon are the usual advice, and the hotel at Mungerannie is the only help for several hundred kilometres in either direction.