Where Do You Sleep on the Indian Pacific?

The Indian Pacific Wheel Race was Australia's great bikepacking statement: solo, unsupported, single stage, 5,500 km of sealed road from Fremantle on the Indian Ocean to the steps of the Sydney Opera House on the Pacific. It borrowed its soul from the 1890s Overlanders - the original Australian distance cyclists who strapped kit to their bikes and raced each other across the continent - and its format from the Tour Divide and Trans Am. "No prize money. Nothing is at stake except honour."

It ran once, in March 2017, and ended in heartbreak: Mike Hall, one of the greatest ultra-distance racers there has ever been, was killed by a motorist near Canberra with the finish almost in sight. There has been no organised race since. But the course itself was never withdrawn - the organisers' site simply notes that anyone riding it now "chooses to do so individually". And people do, every year, as a personal crossing rather than a race.

Which raises the question every would-be crosser asks before anything else. Not "how fast?" - this isn't a race any more. It's: where do I sleep?

One small file, one enormous route

A note on the file itself, because it made us smile: the official course is distributed as a Garmin FIT file, and the entire 5,468 km crossing - 9,989 track points, 34,600 m of climbing - fits in 230 KB. Our Transcontinental GPX covered 4,914 km in 4.4 MB; FIT's binary format does the same job in a twentieth of the space. PitStopper opens it like any GPX: drop it on the front page, watch Australia draw itself.

Then we searched for every place to sleep within 2 km of the line - campgrounds, motels, hotels, hostels and guest houses. On a ride this size, a 2 km detour to a bed is nothing.

The answer: 1,112 places to sleep. Mostly.

The totals look almost generous: 222 campgrounds, 220 motels, 497 hotels, 80 hostels and 93 guest houses - 1,112 places in all, an average of one every 4.9 km. But averages across Australia are a lie with a mean:

Look where they are: stacked into Perth, Adelaide, the Great Ocean Road, Melbourne and the run into Sydney, and strung out one lonely pin at a time across the middle.

The honest planning question is the gap table. First, if you're riding credit-card style - no tent, a roof every night:

Three hundred and seventy kilometres between beds. That's not a long day, that's a day and a half for most riders, through the loneliest country on the route.

Now add a tent, and count anywhere you can officially stop for the night - the same beds plus every campground and highway rest area with camping:

A tent cuts the worst overnight problem on the entire crossing from 370 km to 147 km. And look at the second row: the gap starts at the 90 Mile Sign Rest Area and runs 146.6 km to Caiguna. The 90 Mile Straight - Australia's longest straight road - is officially 146.6 km long. The sleep gap isn't near the straight. It is the straight, to the decimal: lie down at the sign or ride every metre of it.

The Nullarbor, measured

The numbers behind the emptiness, all within 2 km of the route:

• Water is the real danger. 1,973 drinking water points on the whole route - and a 639 km stretch with none of them, from Norseman Rest Area at km 779 all the way to km 1,419. Two further gaps of 537 km and 487 km follow. The Nullarbor sells water at roadhouses; it does not give it away. Plan bottles like fuel stops.
• 632 fuel stations - the roadhouses that are the Nullarbor's entire economy - but the same Norseman-to-Caiguna bracket shows a 370 km fuel gap in the data. Reality check: the Balladonia Roadhouse sits mid-gap and has served travellers since 1962; its OpenStreetMap tagging just doesn't say amenity=fuel near enough to the line. As ever, the map records mapping effort, not reality - treat gaps as warnings to verify, not gospel.
• And a surprise: the longest camping-only gap isn't in the desert at all. It's 185 km in the green east, from Mittagong Camp Site (km 3,814) to Powelltown Rest Area - Victoria's forests, where the land is fenced, private and damp. The desert lets you sleep anywhere; the farmland doesn't.

The whole problem in one picture

Everything above came out of tables. PitStopper's new POI Graph (in beta) draws the same answer instead: every campground and motel plotted by distance along the route against distance from it, with the elevation profile as a shadow behind and - the part we built it for - the gaps shaded and labelled automatically.

Drag a box over the quiet middle and zoom in, and the Nullarbor tells its own story:

Those two red 147 km bands are the same gaps as the table earlier - the left one is the 90 Mile Straight. From here the planning workflow is direct: drag a box over the stops that fit your daily distances, and the selection bar flags the lot for export in one click.

Planning a crossing

The workflow, if the Indian Pacific is on your someday list:

1. Drop the official FIT file on the PitStopper front page
2. Tick Campgrounds and Motels (add Hotels for the cities), set the radius to 2 km
3. Read the gaps in the list - sort by distance along the route and look for the silences
4. Star the stops that fit your daily distances, then export just your starred picks back to a FIT or GPX for your computer
5. Do the same for Drinking Water, and treat every answer over 100 km as a supply-planning problem, not a detour problem

The Indian Pacific Wheel Race belongs to history now, and to the riders who made it what it was. The road is still there - 5,468 km of it, with 1,112 places to close your eyes and one straight where you won't. Ride it gently.

Course details and quotes from indianpacificwheelrace.com. POI data © OpenStreetMap contributors - verify anything you'll depend on out there, and carry more water than the map suggests. Photo by Darren Fleming on Unsplash.