How to use WikiCamps

It would be pretty safe to say that a lot more Australians will be camping this year. With our International borders closed, we feel like our wings have been clipped. Many Australians travel outside their own country before experiencing what is on their back doorstep. This year it will all change. While Covid-19 isn’t quite a memory yet, we have been really lucky. As I write, there are a few cases in Brisbane but the rest of the country is pretty much Covid free.

To get around the country, second to google maps on your phone will be WikiCamps, an app that not only tells you where there are campsites, dump stations, things to see, water etc, but it will also map out your route so that you can find places to camp very quickly. The best $8 you will spend.

Step 1 – Setting up WikiCamps

Download the app and register it. This will allow you to put it on more than one device and have access to all your trips on both devices eg iPad and iPhone. It’s much easier to work on the iPad as the screen is larger. You will have to sync the trips before this will work.

Press the Home button – (picture of the orange house in the top right hand corner)

Under offline content – Touch Offline Maps and download all the states that you will be travelling to as you won’t always have reception or wifi.

Under help – watch the video to familiarise yourself with the app – I have also put some links below to Wiki’s videos and some other peoples

List of videos by Wiki – another 5 very short videos

10 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do With Wikicamps

Using Wikicamps to plan a caravan or camping lap of Australia

Create a new trip

Tools > Trip Planner > My Trips > New Trip

Put in your starting location by pressing the add button, then press place. Press: Look up address, then put in your home address, city or suburb. Give it a name (home) and press done.

Click exit planner at the top right-hand corner. Anything you do outside the planner will be put on the current planner.

Type in the name of the first town you are going to, or if you don’t know put in your goal location. For example. You live in Melbourne and you want to go to Port Douglas. You already have your home address in the planner; now search for a town that you know you want to go to, or just put in Port Douglas for this example in the search bar – it will be under the cities and towns in the lower half of the screen, now press any caravan park or camping spot. It will bring up a bar with a lot of information on it. If you have a caravan, make sure there is a picture of a caravan or the site might not be suitable. Click it again. Look at the reviews, fees and photos. If this is what you want, click on the picture of the car on the right-hand side of the picture to add it to your planner. If not, then look for another one. We will be discussing filters later on. Press Done. Where to insert? I usually choose Use Smart Insert, you can fix it later if it puts in the wrong spot.

Now you will see a green line from home all the way up to Port Douglas. You can now put in other towns or places and then look for camping spots nearby. After you have put in a couple of locations, let’s check that everything is working well.

Click on the orange house again and under Tools, click Trip Planner

If something is in the wrong place, just click it and drag it to where you want it

In the top box with the picture – there are 3 dots called ellipses, click on them, then click Edit Trip Details to add a more meaningful trip name. You can also put in your fuel consumption and make the trip public to share with friends. You will be able to send them a link. At the top of the page it says Change Trip – use this to change to other trips if you are working on more than one at a time.

Sections

You can divide the trip into sections, that is where the next blue box comes in. The heading is My Trip – click on the ellipses and change it to anything you want – Leg one, NSW, Going Home – whatever you want to segregate it from the ones that will follow. If you don’t want to split the trip into sections, just leave it.

To add a new section. Click on the add button that you used to add your home address. This time, choose Header. By creating sections you will see how many kilometres you have in that section and visually it separates the trip.

Click the left arrow under Change Trip to move the detail panel out of the way so you can see your map more clearly. Exit the planner to put in more places. You can add places within the trip planner but you have to know what you are looking for, as you don’t see other possibilities. I believe it is better to do it when you are out of the planner.

Favourites

If you hear of a good spot, mark it as a favourite. That way if you are travelling nearby it will stand out – it will be shaped as like a heart.

When you have created the main route of your trip. Go out of the trip planner. Use the filters to just show your favourites – it’s the very top one. Now you will see where your favourites are located in relation to your route. You can now decide it you want to add a favourite to your itinerary.

Points of Interest

After you have worked out where you are staying, you can now add points of interest along the way. These are the purple flags. Just click on any along the way to see if you would like to go to them and add them to your trip the same way as a campsite.

Sometimes a point of interest isn’t in WikiCamps and you might not want to add it such as your home address. Go into the Trip Planner. You will see lots of “Add” buttons, click one next to the nearest location. You have three choices: Place, Note, Header. Choose Place > Look up Address > now add the address and press okay and it will search for it. If it found the right address click yes and give it a name. You can also change the icon – for home I choose the red hotel one as there isn’t one for a house. You don’t have to have the exact address, you can put in a town or an approximate address because no-one else is going to see this marker, it is just for you.

Sometimes you might have a point of interest that you want to keep that isn’t in WikiCamps so you can’t favourite it but you don’t want to add it to any trip planner yet. For these occasions I save the spot in Google Maps – it saves it under Your Places > Saved and you can also add a note and create a folder. I have a folder for each State. Then when I am putting together a trip in that State, I look at all the markers I have in Google Maps for that State and Add them as Places into the Trip Planner.

Filters

At the end of the search bar is the word Filter – let’s click on it.

By default – all site types are showing. If you don’t need backpacking sites, slide it off – it will say Hide

If you only want free sites, turn everything off except Campgrounds. Then under Site Features, go to the first item called Free with a $ crossed through – click once to show With, go to Toilets and click With too. Click Apply. This will now show you all the free sites that have toilets. There are many other options to ask for such as water, showers, dump spot, or if they are dog friendly. If you are just after one thing eg: dump spots, leave all the camping areas sites off and just put the dump sites on.

When you first go into filters, at the bottom of the “site features” you will see a “more” button, press it once and a “show more” button appears – press this to bring up even more options. Switch off all of the site types, then select things like walking tracks, swimming (for water holes), power available + day use areas if you need to recharge something

I rarely put filters on as I prefer to see all my options. But I can see the benefits of honing in on specifics that you would otherwise miss. I base my camping choices on location and reviews. I don’t feel it is worth driving a long way just to get a cheap or free campsite.

Delete any spot you have put on your trip

Click on the ellipsis and chose Edit Place > Delete

Directions

Not all addresses are easy to find in your car GPS. Click on the next campsite you are going to and press Get Directions (it’s under all the Features and Facilities) > open in Google Maps

Distances

The distances on the planner are as the crow flies, so you need to check these agains something like Google Maps

Notes

You can add a note to your itinerary, you might like to remind yourself to get groceries at a specific major town.

Click on Add > Note

You can also add a note to anything you add. There was a heritage walk where you picked up a map at the railway station, so I put in the station and added a note about the map and heritage walk. This can be done when you are at the insert stage or by going into the trip planner and editing the stop.

Share

To share your trip with friends or family, go into the Trip Planner. Click on the ellipses on the main header > Edit Trip Details.

Under Privacy, push the slider next to Make Public and open the link. Copy to Clipboard, then you can paste it into an email or message.

Sync

I use my iPad to work on my trips as the screen is nice and big but there are times when you are in the car when it is handier to grab the iPhone to get directions to the next location for instance. To have this capability you need to have the same account logged in on each device. To update the second device you need to go into the Trip Planner on the first device. In the top box in the right hand corner is a Sync button. Press it. You second device will now be updated, though you might need to close and reopen the app.

Tips on working out trips

You are making a new trip, say Melbourne to Birdsville – you aren’t going anywhere else – just straight there.

In google maps on a laptop or desktop, put in your starting point and destination. If you don’t like the route it has taken you, you can force it to change by putting in a town such as Goolgowi on the highway if you didn’t want to go up the Strzelecki track. Put in another town up the highway a bit more and see how many kilometres and hours it will take. If the time is too long for short, drag the point to a time you feel more comfortable with. Put in three stops about 600km apart to complete your trip. Then go onto Wikicamps and find campsites near those stops.

Wiki also has two other apps which might help your travels – Gas Finder and Fuel Map

Other camping apps you might like: CamperMate and Aircamp

New South Wales National Parks has a very good app. I haven’t found one for any of the other states.

Camping Tips

I have created a page on Camping Tips which will be updated as I collect more tips

Checklist

There is a pre-loaded checklist on the home page for listing all the things you need to take away with you each trip. This list can be edited. You could also make one for packing/hitching up the caravan for travelling.

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