Tyre Blowout on The Way to Darwin

30km north of Katherine, we drive over a crest and hear a sudden metallic noise coming from the campervan. I pull over straight away as the left hand tire has blown out on the campervan.

We are fine and the Kluger was as solid as a rock as I steered it and the campervan to a grinding halt on the side of the Stuart Highway.

On assessing the damage, basically the remains of a shredded tyre on the wheel rim, we contemplate our next move. Less than 2 minutes later, a police patrol car, an unmarked police car and a semi vehicle driver had pulled up to come to our aid. Two uniformed police got out of the patrol car followed by two plain clothed policemen in the other (they were the drug squad).

We had stopped part on the side of the highway and the left hand side of the campervan was lower in the gravel. A normal jack was useless so the semi trailer driver, (his name was Tom Pearson) rendered assistance with a trolley jack whilst one of the police officers was slowing traffic. I bumped my head trying to get the spare tyre off the back of the campervan and then decided to leave it to the professionals.

Myself and Jen relieved, stood back as Tom and the police attended to the campervan like a precision formula 1 team changing a tyre in a pit stop. You could tell they do this as routine as they have all the tools at hand and the police seemed quite excited to have a job to do. We are thankful for their assistance as we could have been more remote but other truckies would have stopped to help.

The spare tyre has been a spare for 12 years since the campervan was new as we had never needed to use it so the senior police officer suggested we duck back to Katherine as there is a tyre place in town and get a refit.

After shaking hands and thanking everyone, especially Tom Pearson, the truckie, the police guarded the highway as we did a u turn and headed the 30km back to Katherine. Beaurepairs Tyres was across the bridge leading into Katherine. We pulled up and the guys immediately jacked the campervan up on both sides and replaced all tyres including the spare whilst we had a pie for lunch. Bonza!

Our itinerary brings us through Katherine 2 more times so you will get to hear about our visit to Katherine Gorge then. If you check out our footprints map and zoom in a bit, you can see where we had blown the tyre and stopped 30km out of Katherine and U turned to head back..

Back on track, it’s been an eventful start to the day and we continued the remaining 270km up the Stuart Highway to our destination, Darwin.

So after 3,000km, we have made it to Darwin and the Discovery Caravan Park. You Beauty, right next to the airport and fighter jets are taking off in pursuit of each other. There’s War Games being conducted in Darwin jointly with the Australian and American armed forces.

There’s time to rest for a couple of days and explore Darwin before we fly back to Melbourne on Sunday for 5 days. It will be nice to be home but it’s a flying visit as we will be back up next week to start our 35 day Kimberley 4WD Adventure from Darwin to Broome. Our friends, The Lloyde’s, Andrew and Anne left Melbourne last week in their 4WD and are travelling up through the centre of Australia for our rendezvous at The Bungle Bungles on Monday 20th May.

DRIVE: Mataranka to Darwin via Katherine (twice), (444km).

CAMP: Discovery Holiday Parks, Darwin / 3 nights.Read more