2006/08 Australia trip - Balladonia |
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Back on the Southern Highway we had green fields, sheep, cows, and of course more road trains. After a few more stops for flowers – every time we stopped for a new flower there were a dozen other new flowers close by - we made it to the town of Esperance, and took the quieter and scenic drive along the clifftops. This 
was our first view of the Southern Ocean, and it was a perfect day for that, with a blue sky reflected by the sea and lighting up the granite islands out in the Bay of Isles. I’m sure that Esperance is packed in the summer season as the beaches and cliffs and islands are just beautiful, but it was pretty quiet for us there in mid-winter.
Reluctant to rejoin the Southern Highway, we drove further along the coast and took a scenic “short cut” towards Balladonia and the Nullarbor. The coastal road east was busy with magpie and peewees, all black and white birds, probably feasting on bugs. There were so many flying bugs that our windshield needed to be scraped clear every hour.
I had ideas of camping at Cape Arid, one of the state’s more remote parks, but when we drove the coast road towards it there were warnings that the only access was via “difficult” 4wd tracks. That’s not usually a problem for us, but the tracks are often slow going and could take more time than we could afford. So we gave up on Cape Arid, and headed for Balladonia, a road station north on the Eyre Highway. It was only just over a hundred miles across the bush, so we thought we’d be there in a couple of hours. However, the road began with two-lane blacktop, quickly lost a lane, then went to gravel, and then to a muddy 4wd track with trees growing out of some of the track’s craters. The last section of the road was a gated farm track, and the 
gates’ owners had festooned them with underwear in the hope of catching drivers’ attention and saving their gates. We finished the road in the dark, with Sandie dodging rabbits, roos, and a herd of wild camels, as well as looking out for underwear.
We ended up in the campground at Balladonia, all clean and tidy, one of the better road stations.
Friday August 11th
The Balladonia Roadhouse is famous as the landfall of Skylab, back in the 70s. The roadhouse’s owner had a phone call back then from Jimmy Carter, apologizing for dumping American space garbage in Balladonia’s back yard. The road east from there leads to hundreds of miles of the limestone Nullarbor Plain. “Nullarbor” sounds like an aboriginal name but it is actually Latin and means “no trees”.