Crossing the Nullarbor
17th February 2009
Latitude 30'46, Longitude 128'58
Start Mileage: 19827km
Finish Mileage: 23988km
Fuel reading: 6.7/100kms
Trip Notes: wild camels, more roadhouse food and the Nullarbor
Some people call it the Nullabore. It is the treeless plain, the longest straight road, the location of the worst roadhouse food on the planet. The petrol stations over charge, the hotels are a mess. There is nothing to do, nothing to look at and nothing to buy. The monotony is terrifying. So why do people want to travel the Nullarbor Plain?
One man’s monotony is another man’s perfect driving conditions. If desolation was one hundred and sixty two kilometres of dead straight empty bitumen, then bring it on. There it lay before us, the glistening black tarmac of the infamous Eyre Highway. No visible speed limits. No cars to defile our line of vision. We slowed for a second to gaze down at the dream of a million revheads, before putting our foot down and gunning it across the Nullabor Plain. Finally, the Skoda Octavia Scout loved us, as much as we loved it.
Mobile coverage disappeared just after Norseman. Desert scrub clung to the dry red dirt. A wedge tail eagle flew into the eye of the sun and a mob of wild camels ran across the salt pans. It was stark, desolate and hauntingly beautiful. We were absolutely alone.
We were triumphant by our arrival at Cocklebiddy. I had an overwhelming desire to tell everyone where we had been. “G’day mate,” I greeted the station attendant jubilantly. “We’ve just come from Sydney, but the long way round.” I thumbed towards the west, but the attendant just sighed and gave a wan smile. “I just came from Moscow,” said an English tourist beside him dryly.
Our buoyancy was not to be swayed. The last 2000km of our journey lay before us and we planned to savour every moment. We dropped in on the Cocklebiddy Cave, where a tiny crack in the plain leads into an unchartered underground labyrinth of limestone lakes and caverns. French divers made history there in 1983 for the deepest dive in history, but they still didn’t hit the bottom. When we arrived, a woman was singing opera to the stalactites. Her voice echoed madly through the cave, but she gave us a smile that suggested she was doing the most normal thing in the world.
We reached the end of the Nullabor in the late afternoon. Somehow along the way we had formed great expectations of Eucla. We anticipated a thriving desert metropolis to reward us for our labours. Instead, the plains dribbled out onto a wild empty coastline. White powdery dunes had reclaimed the ruins of the old telegraph station and a faded jetty crumbled into the foamy blue water. And as I waded through shallows teeming with shoals of small fish, I sighed with regret that this adventure was coming to end.