2015/11 Australia trip - Crossing the Nullarbor |
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Our next destination was going to be on the other side of Ceduna in South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula, about 700 miles and 2 days drive away. We returned to Esperance and drove the main road north towards Norseman. Rain came and went. Everywhere was wet, but two weeks later this area would be on fire around Grass Patch for a week after hundreds of lightning strikes. Cars were trapped on this road by the fire, killing locals and tourists.
We arrived in Norseman, completing the loop we’d started three weeks earlier. We loaded up with diesel and headed east on the Eyre Highway back towards the Nullarbor. We drove until 
sunset and then took the track out to Newman Rocks. Not a towering rock but just a rocky area about a mile off the highway. Unusually, every depression or hollow was full of water; there was even a temporary lake down below us.
It was a great spot to camp, warmish and out of the wind. We’d be going through quarantine again at Ceduna so we tossed all our fresh veggies into a very large multi-day quarantine curry. Cooked food goes through the quarantine OK.
We seemed to have a problem with the laptop but I was too tired to sort it out.
Wednesday November 4th
The sun rose before 5 am in this screwy time zone. We were off early on a long trip. We passed the Balladonia roadhouse where the shortcut track would have brought us out, and then the 90 mile straight again.
We lunched at Madura Pass where the road drops off the Nullarbor escarpment onto the Roe Plains, mainly sand dunes covered with shrubs and small trees. There were great puddles everywhere; they’d obviously had lots of rain here too. The escarpment was off to the north of us as we crossed the plains, and after a couple of hours we climbed up Eucla pass back onto the Nullarbor Plain.
Just past Eucla we crossed the border into South Australia. The Western Australian quarantine station was on the other side of the road but we wouldn’t reach South Australia’s until the outskirts of Ceduna, 300 miles ahead. There are no towns or agriculture in those 300 miles to be contaminated by an infected carrot.
Again we were searching for a campsite overlooking the sea. There were lots of campers already on the easy access roads close to the highway, but that wasn’t what we 
were looking for. Unlike the sheer Bunda Cliffs, here there are two cliffs separated by a flattish area between the road and the sea. We were trying to find a track that would take us down below the first cliff.
We found one track, a limestone staircase, and stepped partway down but the steps got too large. We’d have got 
down OK but the camper might be too heavy to make the step up.
Instead we camped on the upper edge and walked and climbed down to the shoreline. This was heavily eroded limestone, piles of shattered rocks, crumbling cliffs, and at the bottom a tiny beach. There was also a fair amount of broken car bits, showing that other drivers are braver than us!
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Nullarbor cliffs (2.01) |
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We'd found a few more flowers as we made our way across the Nullarbor, but far less than we’d seen in the southwest.
Once again we found that our campsite and the surrounding area were littered with shells, this time not only high above the beach but also over a hundred yards away from it. Storms here must be impressive.
That evening we found that the laptop was indeed sick, with ¾ of the screen not working. The rest of the computer was probably OK but it was unusable without a digital TV or a monitor to plug it into. Our data was probably safe but I was glad I’d done the backup.
We had a nice sunset, a rare event on this trip.
Thursday November 5th
We had blue skies as we watched the sun rise over the Great Australian Bight; it was warm with a cool breeze. We made our way back up the limestone staircase to the Eyre Highway and the Nullarbor Plain.
We filled up at the Nullarbor roadhouse; as in 2006, the Aborigine’s Yalata roadhouse was closed. Just outside Ceduna we entered South Australia’s wheat fields and passed through the Quarantine station with no problem.
From Ceduna we were going to drive the coast roads around the Eyre Peninsula, visit the Flinders Rangers northeast of Port Augusta, and take the ferry to Kangaroo Island, before driving back along the Limestone Coast and Great Ocean Road to Melbourne. We had three weeks left before our flight home. The rest of our trip will be described in part four of this story.