Where a trip starts
Eleven cities will hand you a set of keys. Which one you take them from decides what the first three days look like.
Not every city on this list is worth starting from, and the difference is not the city. It is what leaves it.
Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane are the easy answer: a vehicle, a sealed highway, a shop every hour. Adelaide points three ways at once, and all three are long. Perth is the only city here where both options are the long way. Hobart is on an island, which changes the paperwork before it changes the driving.
The rest are where people get it slightly wrong. Cairns is the wrong end of the east coast if you want the cities behind you and the reef ahead. Exmouth is the end of a road rather than the start of one, and hiring there means driving back to it. Darwin is the right door for the Top End and the wrong door for six months of the year.
So pick the city before the price. A one-way fee between Adelaide and Perth is real money, and so is the airfare you saved by starting somewhere the road does not go.
- Cities that hire vehicles11
- Routes they feed6
- Longest run between two of them2,613 km
The 2,613 km is Adelaide to Perth, across the Nullarbor, and it is the longest run between any two cities on this site.
Eleven cities, sorted by what leaves them
The register is the whole list. Five of them get argued out underneath it.
Darwin, if you have checked the month
It is the best start on this site for eight weeks of the year, and the worst for the rest.
Kakadu and Litchfield are dry-season country, and the Gibb shuts from December to March. Outside May to September, Darwin is the wrong door, and no amount of planning fixes a road that is closed or a creek that is up.
Inside that window it is the best start here. The sealed run west is 1,870 km to Broome, which is two very long days or four comfortable ones, and it puts the Kimberley at the end of the trip rather than at the beginning. That order matters. You reach the Gibb with a fortnight of highway behind you and no reason to hurry it.
Perth, where both directions are the long way
South to Albany and Esperance is forest, wine and granite coast, and 416 km gets you to the first of it. North to Exmouth is 1,407 km of coast that thins out past Geraldton and does not thicken again.
Perth is also the western end of the Nullarbor, 2,613 km from Adelaide. People treat that as a way of getting somewhere. It is much better as the trip itself, and much worse as a means of arrival.
Two more, and one of them decides your vehicle
Alice Springs is the quiet one. Broome is where people spend money on the wrong hire.
Alice Springs, closer to the middle of nowhere than to anywhere else
Uluru is 450 km southwest and Adelaide is 1,531 km south, and no 4WD is needed for the main sites. That last point surprises a lot of people who have already paid for one.
Start here if the Centre is the trip. Do not start here because it looked central on a map. It is central, and every road out of it is long.
Hobart, where the water decides first
Hobart to Coles Bay is 193 km. Bass Strait with a vehicle is a booking of its own, so the island is not somewhere you pass through on the way to the mainland. You either commit to it or you skip it.
Broome, the one place where the road picks the vehicle
Two roads leave for Kununurra. The Great Northern Highway is 1,129 km and sealed the whole way. The Gibb River Road is a mostly unsealed route and wants high clearance and low range.
Book the van first and you have chosen the highway without ever deciding to. That is the mistake this site exists to prevent, and Broome is where it happens most.
The fee nobody budgets for
A one-way hire is not a rort. It is a vehicle somebody has to bring back.
- One-way between major citiesFee applies
- Against demand, north in the dry seasonHighest
- Relocation deal, fixed dates and routeCheapest
A relocation deal is a cheap, inflexible hire: fixed dates, fixed route, limited days. If your trip is a fortnight and the deal is nine days, that is the whole decision, not a discount.