Day 9 of Broome to Bowral

Some days on the road don’t begin the way you expect.

This one began at 4 am in Kununurra.

Bob and Tom had barely started their 228 km ride to Timber Creek when two stolen vehicles began doing donuts around them. At one point, one of the vehicles came directly towards them.

There wasn’t much they could do. They were on bikes, in the dark, with nowhere to go.

Thankfully, a security patrol came across them and helped get them to safety.

Jenny and I knew nothing about any of it.

We were still back at camp, packing the vans and getting ready to follow them as we’d done every morning for the past week.

It wasn’t until the boys called us just after 7:30, when they reached the border and had signal, that we found out what had happened.

They were understandably shaken.

Who wouldn’t be?

Goodbye Western Australia

Then came a milestone we’d been working on since leaving Broome.

The border.

After a week riding across the Kimberley, Bob and Tom crossed out of Western Australia and into the Northern Territory.

And almost immediately, things changed.

The speed limit went up.

The road quality went down.

The vans were quite happy travelling at 110 km/h.

Looking at some of those patches, I was quite happy with that too.

Somewhere along the Victoria Highway I spotted a sign pointing to Halls Creek.

Halls Creek?

We’d only just come from there a few days earlier.

For about three seconds I thought, there’s a shortcut!

Then I looked at the road.

Dirt.

Duncan Road runs from the Victoria Highway back to Halls Creek, but it’s hundreds of kilometres of mostly unsealed road.

Yeah, nah.

I’ll stick with the highway.

Ten kilometres into the Northern Territory

About 10 km over the border, we had to stop.

ABC Darwin was calling.

Bob and Tom were getting more media attention as the ride continued, and this was the first call before a longer radio interview later that afternoon.

While we waited, Lucky made himself comfortable in the van.

And started yawning.

Then yawning some more.

I took a photo.

Then another.

And another.

I couldn’t decide which one was the cutest.

So they all made it onto the page.

Lucky was tied inside the van so he couldn’t jump out. The highway was just behind us, although we’d pulled into a large truck stop with plenty of room for cars and trucks.

And, as usual, Lucky was surrounded by half our travelling life.

The spare bike was tucked underneath the towel beside him, along with plumbing pipes, the power cord and everything else we’d somehow managed to squeeze into the van.

Apparently none of it disturbed his sleep.

The Northern Territory

The landscape was changing too.

Rock formations rose beside the Victoria Highway, and native kapok trees appeared along the road, their yellow flowers standing out against the dry grass and rock.

About 100 km west of Timber Creek, the country was spectacular.

This was starting to look very different from the Kimberley we’d just left behind.

Saddle Creek

Saddle Creek had been one of the possible overnight stops when we’d planned the route.

Then we got there.

There was a long-drop toilet.

And…

that was pretty much it.

Normally we could have made something like that work.

But Jenny’s hire van still had unreliable plumbing, despite plumbers fixing it in Kununurra.

With another 115 km to Timber Creek, the decision was made.

The boys would keep riding.

At Saddle Creek, Tom arrived first, with Bob about a kilometre behind him.

Then it was back onto the Victoria Highway.

Another 115 km to go.

ABC Darwin

By about 1.30 pm, it was time to stop again.

ABC Darwin was calling back for the proper interview.

Jenny reminded the boys that, yes, they actually had to stop riding long enough to do it.

We all piled into Jenny’s van.

It became so hot, even with the air-conditioning running, that eventually Jenny and I abandoned ship and escaped to my van.

We left Bob and Tom to do the interview by themselves.

They could talk.

We wanted air-conditioning.

Into the dark

This had already been an enormous day.

Bob and Tom had started at 4 am.

By the time we approached Timber Creek, daylight was disappearing.

There had also been backburning along roughly five kilometres of the road near town.

With the light gone, Bob eventually climbed into the support van for safety.

Tom didn’t.

He kept riding.

After everything that had happened that day, he rode those final kilometres beside the van and all the way into Timber Creek.

They’d been going for nearly 15 hours.

It was around 7 pm.

228 km done.

Timber Creek

I camped in my van.

Bob, Jenny and Tom stayed in one of the demountable rooms.

Across the road, backburning was still smoking after running alongside the road for kilometres.

By the time the boys arrived, there wasn’t much left in anyone.

Dinner.

Shower.

Bed.

We’d arrived in a little town with considerably more history than I realised at the time.

Timber Creek sits in Victoria River country, on the traditional lands of the Ngaliwurru and Nungali people, whose descendants still live in the area today.

And the name Timber Creek is wonderfully literal.

In 1855, explorer Augustus Gregory and the North Australian Expedition came into the Victoria River district aboard a boat called the Tom Tough. Gregory named the creek while searching along its banks for timber to repair the boat.

About 15 km west of town stands another reminder of that expedition: Gregory’s Tree, a huge boab near the site where the expedition established its base camp and stayed for around eight months.

Long before Gregory arrived, though, that landscape already had its own history. The tree is an Aboriginal sacred site known as Ngalibinggag, part of a cultural landscape stretching back thousands of years.

None of that was particularly relevant to Bob and Tom that night.

They had just ridden 228 km.

The place itself had been pumping, with live music and the verandah packed with people, but after a 4 am start and 228 km on the bikes, Bob and Tom weren’t exactly looking for a big night.

And then…

look who we found again.

The New Zealand couple.

We’d first met them back at Warmun after their campervan came flying past me on the highway. We ended up camped beside each other that night, and I’d decided fairly quickly that he was a bit grumpy.

I thought that would be the last we’d see of them.

It wasn’t.

Here they were again, hundreds of kilometres later, at Timber Creek.

This time we had dinner together.

And as it turned out, he wasn’t grumpy at all.

He was actually really nice.

So much for first impressions.

There was also another crocodile.

Sort of.

A sign inside pointed towards Coolibah Crocodile Farm, 10 km on the right.

And this wasn’t just another tourist attraction with a crocodile sign. Coolibah was a commercial crocodile farm, established in 1991 near the Victoria River.

This was very definitely crocodile country.

A few years earlier, a 4.3-metre saltwater crocodile had been trapped at Victoria River Downs Station and taken to Coolibah Crocodile Farm.

I still hadn’t seen a real crocodile.

The evidence of the road

And then there was Tom’s arm.

He’d been slip, slop, slapping his way across the country, but the Northern Australian sun was relentless.

Take the watch off and there it was.

A perfect white band around his wrist.

The Broome to Bowral watch tan.

From the road Originally posted during the journey on 29 June 2026. View my original Facebook post →

From the road Originally posted during the journey on 28 June 2026.View the original Instagram post →