After a good night’s sleep we snuck silently out of Fowler’s Bay hidden by the dense fog. Coorabie is the last agricultural town and the end of the farming area until Western Australia. It is a bit of a shanty town now, but in its day had most things such as a school, a shop, both of which are now closed up tight as a drum. We are heading into the Nullarbor – the name is made up of two Latin words, nul meaning no and arbor meaning trees – in other words – there are no trees in the Nullarbor! And it is flat….flat……and flat…..there is nothing but the saltbush for as far as your eyes can stretch on the horizon.
Our first activity was to zoom down a straight, narrow, paved road to the Head of Bight with limestone cliffs 40 to 80 metres high stretching for 800 k to the west and sand dunes that have formed over thousands of years stretching into the distance on the east. According to the information board the dunes are moving inland at a rate of 11 metres per year.
As with the Prairies in Canada, anything that breaks the monotony out here is a feature, so of course we had to stop and have our pictures taken with an iconic warning sign on the highway to be aware of camels, wombats, and kangaroos for the”NEXT 96 km”. That was after stopping to take a picture of the sign informing us of the”NULLARBOR PLAIN EASTERN END OF TREELESS PLAIN!”
We stopped for lunch just before the border into Western Australia. You can’t take fresh produce across this border, so we had to eat, or giveaway, any fruit and vegetables we still had in our food baskets. Once across the border, we moved our watches back 2 ½ hours to Perth time. Apparently there are some other time differences in the areas we went through, but they are not “official” times!!
The next stop was at Telegraph Station and then through the dunes down to the beach. We stopped in Eucla where we saw “Rooey II” and the first hole of the world’s longest golf course which is spread out over the Nullarbor; and we stopped at the Madura lookout over the Nullarbor. En route we saw a beautiful bird called a “bustard” standing in the middle of the road.
This night we had a bush camp and set up tents well off the road in the middle of the saltbush. We sat around our little campfire, amazing at the glorious display of stars, and through the night enjoyed the peace and the silence which was interrupted only by the sound of the big trucks on the highway in the distance.
When you see all of this scenery that explodes your mind with the beauty of the natural world, it is hard to imagine how you can go back to normal life. For a few minutes, I think I understand what makes an “explorer” it seems to me that it would be an addiction to discovering new and remote places, and the experience of living with simplicity and truth.
No comments:
Post a Comment