2015/10 Australia trip - Bunda Cliffs |
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We’d been traveling across the north of the big triangular Eyre Peninsula; if all went to plan we’d be back in a month to explore its coastline. We reached the shore of the Great Australian Bight and the little town of Ceduna, which as well being a seaside resort styles itself as the gateway to the Nullarbor.
The Nullarbor has a reputation among Australian drivers as the country’s longest boring road. The road, part of the Eyre Highway, is certainly long, over 700 miles from Ceduna to Norseman, but we don’t agree that it’s boring. We’ve driven Australian roads where there is nothing at all to look at, just bare earth. The Nullarbor’s name is Latin and means “no trees”, but it is covered with shrubs and is home to plenty of birds and lizards.
The Nullarbor Plain is the world’s largest single chunk of limestone, bordered on its north by the Great Victoria Desert and to the south mostly by sheer cliffs that drop into the Great Australian Bight. The little rain that falls disappears down into extensive cave systems so there are no rivers or lakes at the surface. Consequently, there are no real towns, just roadhouses as much as a hundred miles apart.
In recent years there has been an attempt to turn the road into a tourist experience. Golfers can play a round, with one hole at each location on the road. There are even guided tours north to Maralinga, site of the British atomic bomb tests in the 50s; the tours have received glowing reports.
Just before the plain there’s a side road down to the coast at Head of Bight, a shallow bay where southern right wales gather in the Australian winter to give birth and mate. We saw plenty there in August 2006 but this year we were too late and they’d moved on. We went to the boardwalk along the cliffs anyway to see the scenery; off to our east were sand dunes stretching into the distance and to our west were the Bunda Cliffs, hundreds of feet high and hundreds of miles long.
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Head of Bight (2.49) |
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It’s tough for the larger animals on the Nullarbor, but lizards thrive. These small lizards were plentiful and we also found this much larger shingleback, a kind of bluetongue skink.
The Nullarbor is one of the flattest places on the planet and this would be our view for the next few days. We were now heading west onto the plain, looking for a campsite, 
preferably one on the clifftop with a sea view. This picture gives an idea of what the cliff looks like; the limestone is layered and the top layer is hard, thin and brittle, sticking out over the softer layers below. It’s not a good place for standing on cliff edges.
This first part of the plain is within the national park and there are a few overlooks accessed by blacktop roads but they lack privacy and are fenced all around for safety, not what we were looking for. Eventually we found the ideal side road, a limestone track with natural rumble strips, rough enough to keep the caravan crowd away. It led us out to the edge of the Bunda Cliffs. Sandie thought we were too close to the edge but I wanted an ocean view. We were only about three seconds from the beach.
Friday October 9th
We had a dramatic sky next morning, still cool and breezy though. At least it discouraged the flies. We noted that we had shells on the clifftop; they weren’t fossilized so we wondered what kind of storm would blow them up hundreds of feet above the beach.