Monday, February 11, 2013

Crossing the Nullarbor 8th – 10th December 2013



The Nullarbor Crossing




We had heard so much about the Nullarbor, windy, no water nothing to see, boring. We found it amazing. We headed off from Perlubie Beach and into Ceduna for a fuel fill, water top up and preparation for the journey. We had set up for our freestay at site 669 about 150klm from the Western Australian border right in the middle of the Great Australian Bight. We were lucky we had a tail wind and the car and van was just cruising along.
We pulled into the Great Australian Bight Marine Park. When we walked down the myriad of pathways and wooden decks and saw the bight for the first time it took our breath away, it was unbelievable to see the cliffs and size of these cliffs - the Bunda Cliffs.
If Australia broke away from Antarctica all those millions of years ago, little has happened to cover the scars, this is savage. The height of the cliffs was far more than I had imagined. Our freestay was perched on top of one of these cliffs.
Flies were an issue but the experience was well worth it. We dropped into lookouts all the way through to the Western Australian border where the cliffs started flattening out.
We could not help but notice that South Australia is not that highly populated. Once you get past Port Augusta, there is very little in the way of population, it is just kilometres of bush. The cliffs settle down and next thing we were in Western Australia. I know why the meaning of Nullarbor is ‘treeless plain’,there is not much out here but it has its own personality. The changing landscape and distance just makes this interesting as we don’t have anything like this in Queensland. Our next challenge was the longest straight in Australia, all 146 klm of it and it is straight and
 flat. We hardly started and came up on a wide load which took up about 2/3 of the road. I looked at trying to get around but they were travelling at around 80k/hr so we just sat back and went along for the ride.
We searched out the CB channel they were chatting on and joined in with their conversation, a lot of cheek was going back and forward with Trice renaming them Katut. They were making comments about a blonde in a rest area and Trice said “Keep your eyes of the road Rhonda”, well it just went from there. The back load had a large overhang on the side which is what prevented us from passing. Next thing a car and caravan coming from the other direction mustn’t have been watching or just going too fast but he came off the road slid down the embankment around a guide post and managed to get back up onto the road without losing much speed at all, it was a great recovery but he was very lucky. You hear many stories of caravans being just a pile of rubbish on the side of the road from similar events.


We pulled into our freestay and met an older couple Bonnie and Barry who are travelling around in their bus, they are a lovely couple who were heading in the same direction as us.


At the end here we will turn right and skip up to Kalgoorlie.


 


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