If you are looking for somewhere to practise 4WDing on a variety of tracks or to camp by the water with your friends in a safe environment, Loveday 4X4 Adventure Park on the Murray River in South Australia’s Riverland region is a great place to start your next adventure.
Loveday 4X4 Adventure Park is a place of rugged beauty that you can come back to time and time again. It has so much to offer the 4WDer with obstacles of every difficulty amongst beautiful outback scenery . If you visit Loveday in a 2WD vehicle, I can almost guarantee your next visit will be in your very own 4WD as this place and what it offers is addictive.
Loveday 4X4 Adventure Park proudly proclaims to be Australia’s most popular 4X4 and camping park and can be found near Barmera, approximately 57 kms west of the SA/VIC border. Barmera has plenty of fuel, supplies, and facilities.
The park is over 8000 acres of private property and there are over 40 kms of tracks all over the place, taking you on an amazing journey. There’s 14 kms of Murray River frontage, tracks through the Malley Scrub on the Tour Track, awesome sand dunes, the three hill climbs, and a maze of tracks on the playpen.
All in all, these tracks can provide drivers with any level of 4WDing experience a chance to improve their 4WDing capabilities.
I think this is one of the reasons that people keep coming back. This park has such a variety of tracks for every level of adventure. If you are brand new to 4WDing, with care, you can drive the basic tracks around the property without any concerns of damaging your vehicle. As you get more experienced, you might like to tackle the slightly harder sections.
Challenging yourself will bring out better 4WDing capabilities creating a better and more experienced 4WDer in yourself. Importantly, everywhere you travel, there is always the easy way around any of the more difficult obstacles. You might simply want to watch your mates drive the harder stuff while you take the photos.
The Touring Track is a great place to start with enough themed tracks and tougher sections to keep you busy for up to a couple of hours. It meanders through the Malley Scrub country testing your skills of driving between trees and following course markers to ensure you head the right direction. It’s a lot of fun for all the family as there are many characters scattered around the track if you keep your eyes peeled.
The Playpen is a set of man-made obstacles and mounds that provide anything from easy to crazy difficult obstacles for the 4WDer to experience. Remember, you don’t have to drive any of these obstacles, you might simply want to watch others play, but this is something to experience for yourselves.
The Sand Dunes are really one of my favourite locations as I always love photographing 4X4s in the sand. But this sand has many tricky natural and eroded obstacles amongst it. If you get there early in the am at around sunrise or later in the day around sunset, the sand colour will warm up, improving your photographic opportunities. Make sure you let your tyres down, and if you’re on your own and get stuck, bring out your tyre deflator and let them down a little more to assist in recovering yourself.
The 3 hill climbs are forever changing and usually are not for the beginner. You can drive the easy climb up to the top and watch others climbing up the harder lines if you like. This will provide some amazing views over the property, highlighted by a spectacular views over Spectacle Lakes, home to many species of birdlife. These are difficult tracks and will test people’s capabilities. But if you are experienced and want to have a go, id suggest you take a closer look first as after rain, there can be huge, eroded sections, making some of the track sections impassable.
At the end of each day, you can sit back at one of the 70 camping areas along the Murray River, or maybe one of the campsites back behind the Tavern, and enjoy the captivating sky of the Australian outback. The camping here is ample to ensure you can camp together with all your friends on the same site. In most campsite, access is easy for 2WD vehicles and caravans, so you can invite your mates with their bitumen vehicles to spend some time with you, then take them around to show them how awesome 4WDs really are.
If you are into boating, fishing or maybe would like to take a run on your jet ski, good access to the water launching areas is available, so ask at the Tavern.
The Loveday Tavern really is the hub of the site. It’s the place you check-in at when you first arrive, but it is so much more than that. It has all the facilities, like clean showers and toilets, rubbish and recycling, plus it’s a licensed tavern. It’s a great spot to have a meal and a quiet drink with your friends around the campfire talking to Tony, Jodie or the rest of the Loveday team about the many things you can do.
Pub-style meals and wood-fired pizza are usually available on the weekends and if you have the opportunity of chatting with the team, you will really enjoy the country hospitality they offer. They are extremely keen on looking after the environment and encourage people to practise good land management by keeping the area clean and tidy for future generations to enjoy. They also encourage respect for the environment and insist on either BYO firewood or, if you need it, you can purchase it from the Tavern. There is also a great gift shop where you might pick up a souvenir or even some bits for your 4X4 as they’re pretty well stocked.
What else is there to do at Loveday 4X4 Adventure Park? There is plenty happening nearly all year round:
- Kids Rally Driving (8-16 years) in real cars.
- Gel Blasting Experience
- CanAm Hot lap (3 kms including 9 jumps)
- Ultimate Off Road Experience of 15 kms of Offroad Racing Track
- Tractor Train Ride for kids parties.
Or the kids can enjoy the kids playground while you sit on the lawn at the Loveday Tavern, enjoying the sunshine.
Loveday is also the site for Round 4 of the Australian Off Road Racing Championship, the Loveday 400. The event is open to spectators where people can see Australia’s fastest off-road race vehicles do 11 laps of the property, reaching speeds of over 200 km/h.
Tony is also making efforts to get a new round of Trophy Karts races, aiming 3 rounds per year at Loveday 4X4 Adventure Park.
This is stadium style racing right in front of the Tavern, with these smaller style karts reaching 120 km/h and running 2 or 3 Karts wide making it a great spectator sport. The track is relatively short at 1150 metres, meaning it is all visible from the Tavern.
What do I love about Loveday? The photographic opportunities it creates for us as photographers chasing action and scenic imagery and film footage for our clients.
There is simply so much variety for what we need, plus having the ability to work in a controlled environment means we can do what we do safely and accurately.
The 4X4 industry loves to utilise Loveday’s safe and varied environment, from product testing to customer experiences to others in media like myself.
On the latest of many Offroad Images trips, I ran into the ‘What’s Up Down Under’ crew who were filming an upcoming season of Tough Tested, with Club 4X4’s Dave Carter riding along while 20+ off-road caravans were tested over a number of obstacles.
Many insurance policies have exclusions and limits around 4WDing on private property and off marked roads. If you’re a Club 4X4 customer though, you have nothing to worry about other than how many days to spend exploring Loveday 4X4 Adventure Park
By the way, Loveday is dog friendly, so you can bring your best friend camping with you, they just aren’t allowed at the tavern or the lawns surrounding it.
“Cheers”
-Michael Ellem
Offroad Images
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