Crossing the Nullarbor

The highway to Caiguna boasts the longest straight stretch of road in Australia – constructed by mindless engineers for mindless drivers and gee, watch that first curve at the end, it’s a dilly! You think, “What do I do now? Oh yeah, turn the wheel.” But the Nullarbor is the Nullarbor and it’s mostly long straight stretches and it’s mostly good when it comes to an end. We stayed at Eucla that night. The only mildly interesting aside was the girl at reception telling us, “Park anywhere you like, but some of the power outlets aren’t working and we don’t know which ones they are.” Now there’s a challenge for crusty old campers. Usually you select your site, set up your camper and then plug in the power, but clearly that strategy wasn’t going to work today. Luckily I have a power cord that lights up in an active socket, so I dug that out and proceeded to test for power, rather like a water diviner with a 15 metre long forked stick. I had a miss then a hit. Power! Raise the flag and make camp! Halleluiah! We saw another guy wandering around with an electric hand-mixer, obviously on a similar mission. Malcolm Fraser may be dead but he’s still right, “Life wasn’t meant to be easy”.

Keeping on the straight and narrow

 

It’s funny how you make plans sometimes only for them to be broken, and we fully expected that our next long leg, from Eucla to Baird Bay (some 600-700 km) would be too far and that we would stop somewhere in between, especially seeing that you turn your clocks forward 2 ½ hours when you cross the South Australian border. We got to Ceduna and figured that we could still make Streaky Bay (another 100 km on). We made Streaky Bay and tried to check in to the caravan park – they were full up. We did a hasty shop, fuelled up and sped on to Baird Bay, encountering yet another road works area that coated the car and camper in thick mud.

                                          More roadworks - 5 km of wet clay

 

There was a space in the small camping ground and as we were backing into position our friend Alan (the reason we made for the place) showed up and told us to park over the road on the beach (right in front of a large “Camping Prohibited” sign). Great spot, and Alan looks after the camping area in his “spare” time so who are we to argue. There’s no power, limited water and drop toilets – just perfect for us to test out our new solar power gear and general set-up (and test it, it did). It turns out that we had developed a gas leak (well the camper, not us – well, for the purposes of this story it was the camper…) which put us in danger of gassing ourselves at night while trying to run the refrigerator on gas. The solar system worked well but running the fridge on 12 Volts overnight would only drain the battery. So we only had an Engel to keep things cold and no ice cubes for drinks (I know, First World problem). Something to fix at a later date.

View from our camp site

The locals eat fish around here

Alan and Maurs - friends for over 50 years

 

Alan and Trish run Baird Bay Eco Experience (Google it if you’re interested) that offers people the chance to get up and personal with wild dolphins and sea lions in their natural habitat. We did the tour last time we were here and found it really special. We noticed a lot of European tourists (French, Spanish and German mostly) so word is getting around about how special this place is - it is so remote you have to want to get here. Alan has nurtured a relationship with the local seal colony over 23 years and they have rescued a few orphans in that time. At the moment Alan is helping “Johnno”, a 9 month old male who lost his mum and has been rejected by the colony. He was badly emaciated so they milk-fed him for a while and then weaned him on to fish. Johnno likes it at their place, a little too much. Alan takes him by boat back to the colony and releases him and then Johnno finds his way back to Alan’s place, sometimes ahead of Alan. He is such a cute thing but Alan is trying to maintain him as a wild creature so that Johnno can have the future that he ought to have. We wish them both good luck.

Alan hand-feeding Johnno

Quite a mob wait on for any scraps

White-bellied Sea Eagle

Johnno (so cute). He's about 17 kg at the moment.

It was okay leaving Baird Bay really (we would have loved to stay longer) but a change in the weather was on the cards that promised to blow us off the beach anyway. Our next stop was planned to be the town of Quorn, and the journey there was particularly uninspiring – it’s flat and dry country – although as you get closer to Quorn you’re in the hills and it becomes much more interesting. The town itself is quaint (another Q word!) and the surrounding country is quintessentially Quorny (I’ve just run out of Q words).

If you're ever through Baird Bay drop in and say Hi to Alan and Trish!

Off again

I had a few requests to start up the blog again seeing as I was on the road and not doing anything! So here it is. I’ll begin (fittingly) with a tropical cyclone story. We had set a date a long time before to leave Perth on 15 March and suddenly on 12 March TC Olwyn looms up on the scene with the chance of delaying our start as it moved down over the south of the state. As it was Olwyn moved past and weakened on the Saturday (14^th) and we happily set sail on the Sunday (not much of a story really but there you go, it’s early yet). However it did produce some dust-settling rain and cooler weather for our travel.

Roadside lunch stop.

Kinda quiet at the Carabin Pub

We made for the little town of Southern Cross which is 380 km from Perth on the road to Kalgoorlie and the Goldfields. Maureen’s sister Noeline had lived in various towns in the area when husband Mike was a teacher so it was a bit of a nostalgia tour, remembering different places – and we just had to stop at the Carabin Pub, which was the scene of a few crimes from those days – it was a pretty quiet Sunday as we passed through – very different to what we remember.

Kinda quiet at Southern Cross as well

Southern Cross itself was quite a pleasant town. It looked very innocent but it’s a mining town, a truck stop for the big rigs, and a grain town – there has to be a wild side to it somewhere! Probably luckily, we didn’t find it.

There was an early casualty. I lost the tow-ball cover when I left it loose on the camper and it simply blew away as we drove east. Consequently there is an exposed grease-covered tow-ball at the end of the X-Trail so Maurs has all these black stripes on her legs (she never learns). Don’t worry though – she keeps letting me know every time she brushes against it. And every servo I stop at doesn’t seem to have a replacement.

That loss paled into insignificance the next day. The highway had been converted into a fifth rate country track courtesy of the Main Roads Department’s efforts to improve it. While bouncing around at 40 km/h my Anderson Plug (electrical connection to the trailer) popped out of its socket and ran along the dirt, then bitumen, until we hit Coolgardie and discovered the damage of which there was plenty. We drove on to Norseman, found an auto-electrician who replaced it for us. “Second one today!” he said.

One dead Anderson Plug

All better!!

We had only stopped at Coolgardie to buy me some deodorant (might have forgotten to pack it). When I went to use it that night, the top of it snapped apart and what I thought was plastic packing turned out to be – sticky tape. The bums at the store had obviously busted it and bodgied up a repair job, selling it at full price – and I didn’t have enough principles to travel backwards 200 km at night to get my 5 bucks back. I’ve now re-repaired it and sucked it up.

My ripped off deodorant - this stinks!

We stopped at a place called Widgiemooltha for lunch, partly because it was our 41^st wedding anniversary and I wanted to treat my wife to a chicken and salad sandwich, and partly because it’s a place from my past. As a forecaster in the 80’s I used to get calls from weird sounding guys wanting the winds below 1000 feet and the weather between Widgiemooltha and Perth. Why? For pigeon racing! Widgie (as they called it) was a mecca for the pigeon fancier back then but according to the young guy who served us, not any more. The chicken sandwiches were very good by the way (at least I thought it was chicken! It couldn’t have been pigeon, surely!)

Widgiemooltha - and not a pigeon in sight!

Fraser Range - not all fences are this old

We made camp at Fraser Range that night. We do like the station stay there but they have charge showers - $1 for 5 minutes – feed the meter. Do you know how hard it is to count “one Mississippi, two Mississippi…up to 300 Mississippi” so that you get your money’s worth from the shower (and not be left covered in suds when the water stops)? It’s not all beer and skittles on the road, let me tell you. Onwards to the Nullarbor!