If you’re thinking about or planning a Simpson Desert journey on your own, chances are you are sweating about the gear and equipment that you might want (or need) or take with you. And while there are a lot of things you’ll need to consider, we should also be wary of not carrying absolutely everything.
To help you with your own planning, we’re running you through what we have planned (and packed) for our journey. Your needs and mileage will likely vary, as will your own tastes, so think of this guide as more of a starting point than a be-all-and-end-all.
The most important stuff – non-negotiables
PLB
PLB stands for personal locating beacon and is something that any traveller who veers off the beaten track should carry. It’s vitally important, but you should hopefully never have to use it.
Think of it like the get-out-of-jail card – not necessarily free – for when you find yourself in a serious emergency that you cannot fix yourself. Catastrophic mechanical breakdown, serious injury, that sort of thing.
Deploying this PLB connects to emergency services via GPS satellites, and sends them to the exact location.
Maps and Navigation
This is an obvious one, but one that needs plenty of consideration. Maps come in a variety of forms, and I recommend travellers carry some good old-fashioned paper maps. They’re hard-wearing, practical, don’t run out of battery, and can give you a good view of the surrounding countryside for planning and research.
But, there’s also something that tugs at heartstrings with paper maps. Pull them out of the glovebox, and open them up over the bonnet with your morning coffee in hand. You can learn more about the topography and various points of interest along your route, and exactly how many kilometres you’ll be travelling.
For the Simpson Desert, it’s hard not to recommend Hema paper maps as the gold standard. They’re well researched and up-to-date, we carried a variety of new and old Hema maps.
We also carried a Hema HX-2 Navigator on this journey, which could be seen as a convenient indulgence rather than an essential. The unit itself is good, with all of the maps you could ever desire pre-loaded. It’s also handy for easily pinging your exact location.
However, with smart use of your trip computer or odometer – along with a pen and paper – you can do this easily without needing a GPS unit. Simply keep a log of many kilometres you make at each intersection or landmark, which will allow you to accurately track your location on the track. Provided, of course, that you stay on the track.
Desert Parks Pass
This is an essential little handbook – and permit – for travelling through the Simpson Desert. It incurs a fee of around $150, which is an important ingredient in maintaining and managing the desert landscape.
The handbook has some handy information inside, some basic dos and don’ts, and guides to local flora and fauna. Plus, there is a good-quality map of the desert.
Communications
Communication is another important facet of desert travel. Emergency communications are one thing, but your general communications in convoy and between other travellers are also important.
Most four-wheel drive vehicles should have a five-watt UHF radio, along with an antenna mounted somewhere on the outside. We didn’t have that choice this time around, hacking into Toyota’s own vehicles to install a radio. Oo instead, we opted for a five-watt GME handheld radio for main communications duties.
Carry multiple radios if you can, and have one set on channel 10 – which acts as the communal channel for desert travellers to communicate. It’s handy for knowing how much traffic is on the track and negotiating getting past and around each other.
Sand dunes can have an impact on the quality of your radio transmissions, along with how many decibels of gain your antenna is. So if you’re having trouble getting through, try again on the top of a dune.
First Aid
And of course, you need to be prepared from a first aid point of view. Carry a well-stocked first aid kit with you on your travels, with something that can treat things like cuts, burns and snake bites. And of course, ensure you know how to use it before you go. If you don’t, enrol in a first aid safety course.
Recovery gear – Self-recovery
Self-recovery is fairly straightforward and revolves mostly around a long-handled shovel. You want a long handle because you might need to dig sand away from right underneath the chassis when you get especially stuck.
Carrying some recovery boards – like the Maxtrax that we have on the roof of the LandCruiser 300 Series – is another good idea. These can act like a shovel and can perform miracles sometimes in getting a car to drive itself out of a bog. Just don’t be afraid to dig a lot to help them in their task: pull away as much sand from the chassis and wheels as you can, and get the tracks positioned underneath the wheels.
Another tip for self-recovery is a good quality tyre gauge and an air compressor. If you don’t have the luxury of pulling yourself out of a bogging, then airing down – temporarily – to a very low pressure might solve the problem for you. And once you’re out, you can pump them back up again.
Recovery gear – Recovery kit
You’ll need a good variety of recovery equipment for your own desert crossing, but don’t fall into the trap of carrying every single thing under the sun. You’ll be heavier than you’ll need to be, and you’ll have no roof for other stuff.
However, there is an important baseline of gear you need to carry. Most of this will be covered in your standard recovery kit; things like a snatch strap, shackles, extension strap, a tree trunk protector, shackles and gloves.
I’d complement this with some additional shackles and straps (of varying lengths), so you can run a distance of up to 50 metres between vehicles.
If you’ve got a winch, that’s great. It might get some use in the desert. If not, however, don’t worry. Leave your snatch block at home as well, and save a couple of kilograms.
Do some thinking about how you’ll want to join your straps together if you need to. Don’t use something hard like a shackle. Instead, use a soft shackle or pack the knot with sticks/magazines to ensure you can undo it once again. One good tip I learned from an old desert traveller was to chop up lengths of lightweight dowel and use that for joining straps together.
And it’s worth saying here: practising safe recovery techniques is of the utmost importance: reduce the risk of injury by keeping bystanders far away from dangerous areas, use correctly rated gear in good condition, and only use rated recovery points.
Recovery points
Don’t fall into the trap of thinking your tie-down points are sturdy enough for serious off-road usage. They might look decent but can fail under the heavy loads of something like a snatch recovery.
If you don’t have them fitted – either from the factory or aftermarket – then you’ll need to invest in some. A tow hitch receiver at the back is sufficiently strong for the job, using either a recovery hitch or pin for fitting a strap.
In our case, the 300 Series LandCruiser is smartly set up with twin front recovery points – well designed for off-road abuse. And the rear end has a tow hitch receiver, which will also do the job.
For the 79 Series, we need to be a little more inventive. It doesn’t have recovery points front or rear, so we’ve got a plan to use bridle straps over parts of the chassis to spread the load as much as possible.
Recovery Skills
You don’t want to be that guy with all of the gear and no idea, trust me. So if you don’t know what the details of a safe and effective recovery involves, enrol yourself in a course to learn. Think of it like the off-road equivalent of a defensive driving or advanced driving course for a road-going car. You’ll be more confident and capable in yourself with these skills, and you’ll likely enjoy the journey a lot more.
Fuel
Unless you’ve got a long-range fuel tank fitted to your four-wheel drive, then you’ll likely need to carry some extra fuel with you on your journey. Jerry cans are cheap and effective in this case but will need to be carried outside of the cabin.
In our case, we’ve got two hundred and forty litres of capacity between our two Landcruisers: 110 for the 300 series and 130 litres for the 79 series. If conditions are good, there is a chance that we could make it all of the way across without needing any extra fuel. However, carrying none in reserve would be folly.
Conditions could be adverse, multiple boggings and recoveries will quickly eat into precious reserves, and you might need to take on additional detours around sodden claypans.
One major detour you need to keep in mind is eyre creek, along the QAA line. If the creek is flooded, you’ll be taking a fifty-kilometre detour to the north to make it across.
With these things in mind, we have an additional 80 litres of fuel available in four yellow jerry cans. Let’s see if we’ll need them or not.
Water
Water requirements are a tricky one to bed down, but budgeting on five litres per person per day isn’t a bad place to start. This will depend upon how much water you will use in your washing and cooking, which can be reduced by some tricks.
Carry your water in multiple containers, cheap insurance against a leak or puncture leaving you with nothing. 20-litre Water jerry cans are cheap and readily available, as well are smaller ten and fifteen-litre pre-filled plastic containers, complete with a tap, from supermarkets.
For four days in the desert and four people, we had the requisite 80 litres of water amongst water jerry cans and store-bought containers.
Tips for crossing the Simpson Desert
Food
I’d recommend against taking normal starches like rice, pasta and potatoes for desert travel. They tend to take a lot of water and energy to cook, and you can look at some easier alternatives.
Look at packets of par-cooked microwave rice or cous-cous instead of pasta. You can still make tasty and satisfying meals at camp, but you can also do it with a mind to keeping things efficient.
I can tell you that instant mashed potatoes – with a healthy dose of butter and salt – taste fantastic around a campfire.
Choose fruit and vegetables that travel well and don’t bruise easily, like Zucchini, eggplant, oranges and mandarins. Some vegetables grill easily in a pan or over a fire, and cryovacced fresh meats will last for weeks in a fridge without the need for a freezer.
However, you can buy basic meats, fruits and vegetables and other pantry items in places like Birdsville and Marree, meaning you don’t need to buy everything in big cities. Plus, it’s another opportunity to put a little bit of money directly into the till of some of these local businesses.
Wrap bread travels well and can double as an edible plate that saves washing up. Paper plates are another handy idea if you want to reduce the amount of water you use in washing up.
Packing Tips
When packing your groceries, veer away from glass containers as much as possible, and pack in a way that protects more brittle packaging from one another. We used a sturdy space case as a pantry for our journey but did, unfortunately, have a milk blowout in the desert. It happens, and at least it was all contained in place rather than being spread around.
Use space cases like these for usage in a tray or tub when things are exposed to the elements, but save weight and space by using generic plastic containers and tubs in wagons, for storage and keeping things organised.
If you’ve got a ute, you won’t have many issues carrying your spare fuels, whether that’s diesel, petrol or gas. If you’ve got a wagon, then you need to consider this a bit more delicately. It’s not a good idea to carry smelly, sloshing fuel containers inside the cabin, especially when there is a chance of leaking.
Something like a roof rack is very useful in this case, providing you with some storage space outside of the vehicle. Don’t forget, that stuff on the roof adversely affects your centre of gravity and fuel consumption, and you need to be conscious of not overloading the roof rack and roof load capacity.
Of course, the gold standard for carrying extra fuel is installing a long-range fuel tank. This stores the extra fuel away from your other storage locations and doesn’t require potentially messy decanting.
Fridge
A journey like this can be undertaken without a fridge and using an old-fashioned esky with enough ice to last the distance. However, the convenience and performance of a good quality 12V fridge are nearly impossible to live without once you’ve had one.
Having a fridge means you need sufficient 12V auxiliary power to run the fridge, which would often be a permanently installed system in a four-wheel drive. In our case, however, we are using an Ecoflow lithium battery box to run our fridge, along with charging up a variety of camera gear and other equipment.
It’s not cheap at $3000, but offers very good performance, with a lot more grunt than your average hundred amp-hour 12V system. It also has multiple household power outlets a powerful inverter, USB, USB-C and 12V points. It also allows you to keep an eye on the system via an app on your smartphone.
This five-part series will publish twice-weekly from September 12 2022.
READ EPISODE 1 – Getting there
Find all episodes and plenty more at our Toyota LandCruiser Simpson Desert Adventure here.
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