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!