Nullarbor: The home straight

I'm using a little artistic licence here - in reality we've got a few crowded chicanes around Melbourne and Sydney to negotiate before our lap of Australia is really done. But the Nullarbor stretch is the final long haul, and it also features the longest section of straight road in Australia - 90-odd miles - which must rank pretty high in the world considering the size of this country. So home straight it is.

I was going to call this entry "Disappointingly Interesting". We'd been led to believe that the road that connects the pocket of civilisation around Perth with the majority of Australia's population in its southeast corner would be the pinnacle of Aussie boredom driving - days of flat, featureless plains, deserted apart from the odd roadhouse here and there. Nullarbor is bad Latin for "no trees", you see. And if you've been paying attention, you'll know that we've already covered several stretches like that. So in a spirit of masochistic challenge-seeking, I was looking forward to our last epic dusty journey being the worst, and therefore in a way the most satisfying, of the lot.


We never saw camels, sadly

But as it turns out, the drive was neither arduously long nor particularly flat or dull. How disappointing! The first day's scenery was mostly pretty featureless, but certainly not treeless. And for the last couple of hours of the day we were driving alongside a distinctly featuresome ridge. Our overnight stop in the middle of the Nullarbor was at Eucla, just short of the border with South Australia. Eucla sits on top of the small ridge we'd been driving alongside, and from the caravan park we could see for miles back along the highway we'd just travelled, and to the left, cliffs and the Great Australian Bight in the distance. The picture at the top is the view back along the highway.

As for the following day, well... I wasn't expecting such excitement. The first thrill was crossing into South Australia, our fifth state in a series of eight. We'd spent exactly two months in Western Australia, so although it is definitely our favourite so far, it was time to move on. And South Australia seemed like an appropriate choice.



Once in South Australia, the highway hugs the coast of the Bight for perhaps 100km. We stopped and walked to the edge of the cliffs for a quick look, and it really felt like you were standing on the edge of the world. And in a sense you are, as looking out to sea, there's nothing but Antarctica ahead of you.



And that was just about that. We arrived at Ceduna, the first town on the eastern side of the Nullarbor, with a couple of hours of daylight to spare. So the infamous Nullarbor odyssey was over in less than two days. We've definitely done hotter, dustier, flatter, more monotonous sections of road in the north of the country. Ah well. It was definitely good news for the van, which has carried us from Broome in the northwest down to Adelaide in the southeast in just 14 days, and is in need of some therapy.