Hi everyone thanks for the comments, we would recommend doing this trip with your van, but just remember I did a heap of things to the van before leaving some of them are every screw inside and outside of the van was taken out one at a time and put back with liquid nails, all the electrics under the van was covered with garden hose pipe to protect them, and every pipe that went through the floor was resealed with seam sealer and then the whole of the underneath of the van was painted in bitumen paint to water proof it, we had mud guards protecting all the waste pipes and water tanks etc, we also had a vent on the top of the roof with a filter system on it to prevent dust which I have to say worked great, we did meet others with more expensive van that had heap more dust in them than we did, you will never stop all of it as you take in with you on your feet and clothes and we also had 3 little kids with us so that made it harder, but we kept everything clean and dry so we were very happy. We also had the simplicity suspension fitted at the factory and I think this made a big difference in the way the van travelled.
Drewy to answer your question about taking the van up to the top, I would and did so yes it can be done, but you just have to take your time and make sure it’s setup to do this sort of trip, we started the cape section at cook town and drove the whole of battler camp road which was beautiful and worth every bit of it, if you go this way stay the night at Laura river free camp and stay on the river bed this way an awesome spot. There are plenty of places to camp along the way, not so many free camps but plenty of homesteads that let you camp there for a fee, we stayed two nights at bramwell home stead and had a ball the people there were great, and then we went along the old telegraph track from there without the van, this is very rough and should only be done if you have some degree of experience in 4wd driving, we had water up to the middle of our windscreen on one of the water crossing that was a stressful I can tell you.
Here is a video of us crossing a washout heading to Weipa after we did the cape this is a short cut lovely road but rough as
[video=youtube;lnGDVJaNxBM]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnGDVJaNxBM[/video]
I have more videos I’ll keep posting them for you, we are planning our next trip to leave this time next year we are going over the Simpson desert then linking up to the canning stock route to do the northern part of it and yes we are taking the jayco!
