The Nullarbor

Long Road.  The Eyre Highway.

As we turned on to the Eyre Highway at Norseman, at the start of the Nullarbor, the GPS told us to continue straight ahead until the next roundabout....in 1199km’s.  (And even then we were to continue straight ahead!).  It is a long, long straight road.  At one point we drive along a stretch of road for 146.6km’s without a turn (guidebook moment: “The longest straight stretch of road in Australia”).  There aren't too many bends in the rest of it either.  We took three days to make the crossing. 

Big Cliffs.  The Great Australian Bight

Along the way we enjoyed bush camping under huge starry skies. We enjoyed the warm evenings.  We enjoyed the wide open spaces. And we enjoyed watching dolphins swim in the cold waters of the southern ocean whilst clinging on to each other to avoid being blown from the towering cliffs of the Great Australian Bight.  We didn’t enjoy the legendary flies too much. I have a theory that the reason people do such long hours in the car across the Nullarbor is not because of the distances and the, at times, featureless landscape, but because they can’t bring themselves to get out of the car until the sun goes down and the flies, mercifully, disappear.  Our very fashionable fly proof head nets came out quickly whenever we were forced to be outside in daylight hours.   At times it was like moving through a thick black fog... Buzzing black fog.

On the second day we crossed from Western Australia, where we have spent the last two and a half months, into South Australia.  Sometime before we hit Eucla, way before the WA-SA border, a sign instructed us to move our watches forward 45 minutes to Western Central Time.  Western Central Time?  What’s that?  We had never even heard of it.  It was only on subsequent research that we discovered that there is a tiny slice of coastal, eastern, Western Australia that seems to have invented its own, unofficial, time zone.    At the border we obviously missed the sign to move our watches forward again to Australian Central Standard Time and think we should have taken into account daylight saving changes that had happened in some other states whilst we were in WA and for the first time in the trip, not only did we not know what day it was, but now we were no longer certain what time of the day it was either.  In the end I think we moved clocks forward by a couple of hours or so and decided that would be close enough... what did it matter anyway J

Big Wind

On the third day, surprisingly we woke up to a cold, windy and cloudy morning.  I’m sure people who spend a lot of time on the Nullarbor, (as well as going slightly bonkers), would know that it gets cold and cloudy on the Nullarbor at times, but it seemed strange to us.  In some ways it made the landscape even more impressive.

One upside was that the cold helped to keep the flies at bay - Australia bush flies are at their most active between 12 and 27.5 degrees Celsius. (For this and other fascinating facts about Australian bush flies (and dung beetles) check out this that I came across on the internet (In a quieter moment). Fascinating stuff (well, fascinating to me)!

As usual , when we emerge from a few days in ‘the wilderness’ we had mixed emotions when we started to see the farmhouses, fields of wheat and increased car numbers  that signal our return to civilisation.  Still, can’t say we weren’t happy to reach Ceduna and head to the bakery for coffee and iced buns.