Evan flew home from Mount Isa, and from there it was just me and the bike. A haircut in town, then west to Camooweal — an easy warm-up before the longest single leg of the entire lap: 260km to Barkly Homestead, ridden into a thirty-five kilometre crosswind that turned it into a five-hour grind at sixty.

 

The Barkly Highway runs west and Stuart Highway run north from there through a string of roadhouses, each with its own charging story. A DC fast charger at Warrumungu let me finally open up the throttle. Renner Springs gave me a bull that owned the road and wasn’t moving for anyone. Elliott’s low-capacity charger, bolted to a bright yellow toilet block, somehow became my most-viewed social media post of the trip to date. Larrimah put me up at the Pink Panther pub tied to the Paddy Moriarty mystery — five years gone, never found.

 

Then the big one: Larrimah to Darwin in a single 490km push, through Mataranka and a 130km/hr high-speed stretch into Katherine, where a Saturday charge beside the markets turned into an impromptu meet-and-greet — eight or ten people, curious about range, charge times, what it’s like to ride electric this far from anywhere.

Katherine to Darwin brought crosswinds, thirty-five-degree heat, and a battery too hot to charge quickly at Adelaide River due to the previous fast charges heating the battery earlier in the day. Darwin itself meant an ABC Radio interview, a full rest day, and the bike stripped down for inspection — frame, bolts, chain, all sound.

 

Heading back south, Katherine’s Beagle Hotel produced one of the trip’s best moments: a manager who’d read my charging request in advance and had a room and a dedicated EV socket waiting on the veranda before I’d even parked. From there, a new NRMA solar charger at Victoria River stopped me in my tracks — a freestanding, off-grid, modular canopy system that struck me as genuinely the way of the future for remote-area charging.

 

The Kimberley run that followed was everything I’d hoped for. Timber Creek, then a frustrating tangle with a Chargefox unit at Warnum that kept cutting out mid-charge — five restarts to get enough range for Halls Creek, a town that runs behind serious security fencing around its main pub complex all locked down after dark.

 

An off-grid charger at Ngumban Cliff, running at a fraction of its rated output but exactly enough, got me through the next 100km stretch to Fitzroy Crossing, where I improvised a charge off a Tesla socket with an 3 phase - 15A adapter socket I’d built myself — parked, fittingly, right beside the fuel bowser.

 

Willare Bridge Roadhouse, running on its own diesel generator, saw me through the last push into Broome. I rolled up to the Mantra at Cable Beach, charged on the veranda, and closed out Section 4 — Mount Isa to Broome, solo, done.

Sally flew in from Sydney that afternoon. Section 5 starts with good company down the west coast to Perth over the next 3 weeks.