The rugged coastline of the Great Australian Bight promises a great adventure. The powerful Southern Ocean collides in to the long lines of cliffs and longer white beaches. It is a remote area that is seldom visited. The Bilbunya dunes tower snow white, a Western Australian mountain range. From our starting point in Balladonia, out near the WA/SA border, we plan to run back west, all the way through to Esperance. It’s a distance of 535km and we head off to the starting point on Saturday! 

Great Australian Bight – here we come!

This trip is a simple one – just two vehicles, me and my buddy Luke. Preparation is half the fun and for us seems to fall in to three key areas – food, gear and route. After gazing at maps for hours, curiosity is usually the catalyst to go experience a new place for myself. The process of route planning gets me excited, both about the places we will visit and the challenges that likely lie ahead.

For this trip we decided to plan the route with Hema’s Explorer system. It consists of two main parts, the Hema Explorer Cloud and the Hema Explorer App. The cloud gives you the ability to plan from the convenience of your computer. Share the “draft” with your friends in the planning stage. When it’s saved the route simply syncs to mobile devices ready to go! 

It’s important to note that it’s easy to plan a route directly from mobile devices too, although big screens are hard to beat! Hema have recently released Version 3.0 of the App which we will be running on our iPad Mini and iPhone. We’ve also upgraded our App to the Pro version, which promises topographical maps that zoom right in to to 1:9,000, along with more maps and features. We’ll report back in on how we found the new App and how our planning worked out…

To get started create a free account at cloud.hemamaps.com. Zooming in and out you can browse for trip ideas or get some ideas from the gallery, which has routes saved by other users. Many of the tracks have geotagged photographs, which is great way to get the feel of an area in advance. 

Click “create route” and start planning your next adventure

Changing “active map layers” gives access to a variety of maps, the Hema Explorer Map seems a good one to start. It’s easy to create a “route”, simply click the “+” symbol from the main map view and then “Create Route”. Click away following the tracks to create an adventurous journey. 

Our devices are synced up ready to go, and we can’t wait! Click through to the cloud to take a closer look at our route for this trip.

Hema Explorer Cloud

Hema Explorer Cloud is available for both Australia and North America – for more technical details visit Hema. For similar articles head over to our Communication & Navigation category.

Mike Collister

Founder of Adventure Curated, Mike has spent his life outdoors. He has represented Australia as a slalom kayaker, guided whitewater expeditions in Nepal, and taught outdoor education and wilderness medicine. He’s paddled the Kimberley’s Fitzroy River in the wet season, across the Bass Strait and has explored many of Australia’s remote areas by 4x4.