Across the Nullarbor: Eucla to Fraser Range
13th July, Eucla to Fraser Range, Australia
I woke early this morning - 6:50 am - and immediately set about getting ready for another day of serious driving. Some people were obviously more serious than me, though, as I spotted a car pulling a caravan out of the park and heading west just after 7am. For me, this was still just a little too early - nothing to do with being sleepy, but rather it was not quite light enough and in my books that means there's still the chance of running into a kangaroo. We eventually got back on to the Eyre Highway just before 8am.
The weather was perfect for driving - dry but not so sunny that you have to squint through the windscreen and cool enough to run a VW Kombi for hours and hours at high speed and not feel like the engine is gonna blow up on you! Someone was having bad weather, though. To the north, we could see clouds stretching over the nearly featureless plains way into the distance, and those clouds at the outer edge (nearest us) resembled jellyfish - the rounded clouds looked like the jellyfish's body, while the rain cascading to the earth below looked like the jellyfish's tendrils. And no, I had not been taking any drugs to help keep me awake for the day's impending drive! Another strange weather-related phenomenon was to see a rainbow from many miles away. There was no hint of an arc, just a straight multi-coloured band from the cloud base to the ground.
Just 60km down the road from Eucla was our first stop of the day. Nothing exotic, just a petrol stop at a place called Mundrabilla. We had been told that this place was a cheaper option to fill up than Eucla. I've not really paid much attention to petrol prices, but for this stretch I certainly have. For example, the usual price per litre of unleaded in cities is about 98 cents (approx 40 pence UK), but once out here in the middle of almost nowhere, the prices can be 135 cents per litre, and our source had suggested that Eucla might charge as much as 150 cents per litre. When the petrol can cost 1.5 times the usual amount, and you are filling up for long distances, it pays to be a little choosy (and Mundrabilla was a good option at 119 cents per litre). On the other hand, you cannot be too choosy - I imagine that a lot of people see the prices and say to themselves "You're having a laugh, mate" and opt to try the next service station ... and then run out of fuel another 130km down the road. It happens, and the only way to get going again is to hitch a lift to the nearest station and back again - they don't do deliveries!
We passed another sign warning of animals on the road.
Honestly, these signs lie - where are all the leaping kangaroos, running camels and foraging wombats? Maybe the signs are just there for the tourists. It would be more truthful if they just put up signs like this:
OK, so someone must be knocking them over for so many dead roos to be littering the road side, so the warning signs are for real. At a service station in Cocklebiddy we saw a wise piece of advice: 'Don't travel at night'. The hand-written note appeared underneath a photo laminated on to the counter of a roo/car encounter. The roo was not a big one, but in the collision had managed to become completely jammed into the car's radiator grille. It was almost comical, like an over-enthusiastic postman had tried to force a large package into a small letterbox and gave up half way through. The bulk of the body, an arm and a leg were somewhere in the engine bay, while the remaining arm/leg combo and a rather sad-looking head hung out the front.
Judging by the prevalence of kangaroo carcasses, I reckon that by the time we get to Norseman - the end of the Nullarbor Plain crossing - we will have easily passed a good 500 dead roos, in various states of decomposition from freshly mulched, through 1-week-old ready-to-bursts (you should see how some of these big suckers bloat up!) to the barely-there collection of sun-bleached bones. My only hope is that we don't make it 501.
A common sight along the Eyre Highway - large, but very much dead, kangaroos.
We continued on, scanning the sides of the road for any hopping movements, and soon found ourselves on the longest stretch of straight road in the whole of Australia. 90 Mile Straight (or 146.6km in new money) is exactly that - a boring road that goes up and down a little, but little else. It is, however, so easy to cruise along it's a joke. Wanna get good fuel consumption? This here's your spot. I have to say, though, that I've never been so excited about spotting a slight kink in a road as I did after those 90 miles, and I'm sure I'll never be that excited at such an ordinary feature again.
The Rules of Waving
Something else in addition to the road-kill that travellers doing the Nullarbor crossing will soon get used to is 'the wave'. Now, we have waved to other travellers before, but only to Kombi drivers; it's an unwritten rule but well understood. Other minivan/campervan drivers - for example Mitsubishi L300s or even other Volkswagens, like the Transporter range - don't warrant a wave, and caravan drivers don't count either.
In some ways, it's a little like the greetings you exchange when staying at caravan parks - the more remote a place you're staying in, the more likely you are to say hello to complete strangers as you walk to the amenities, while in bustling caravan parks near major cities the more you keep your greetings to yourself. And so it translates to crossing the Nullarbor ...
Pretty soon after leaving Port Augusta, we noticed that other drivers would wave as we passed. Not just Kombi drivers (there aren't many on the Nullarbor), but all travellers - they wave, you wave back or vice-versa. Truck drivers don't partake; they do this route all the time, it's not any fun for them. Caravan owners, other camper van drivers, people bombing along in their saloon cars, they all give you the wave.
After a while, the wave/response wave can get a bit tedious, and so you notice that some drivers have given up actually raising their hand off the steering wheel - the hand rises, but the heel of the palm stays firmly planted on the wheel. Then there are the supremely lazy wavers who merely raise their index finger in acknowledgement, as if pointing to something in the sky. Then, just occasionally, you get the really enthusiastic wavers who flap their hands around like they're being filmed for the end credits of a TV game show, which makes it all fun again.
You remember what I said about waving to other Kombis? Well, on the Nullarbor, that wave thing goes into overdrive - it's flashing lights, over-enthusiastic waving and cheesy grins on both sides as the respective Kombi drivers take pleasure in realising that the Nullarbor is not only being crossed by people in reliable, shiny, new 4-wheel drive vehicles with working heaters/air conditioning. Keeping it real? You betcha!
We saw two Kombis today on the road, and then, as we pulled in to a service station at Balladonia (site of the Skylab crash in 1977), I spotted another. Naturally, we exchanged waves and, after refuelling, I went over and chatted with the owners. They had already crossed the Nullarbor one way and were heading back again - see, Kombis are up to the job! The other van in the convoy of two was a nondescript-looking Toyota Hiace that was sporting a rather large dent in the front. I asked the owner what happened and got the reply I was expecting: "It was a roo."
"What time was that?" I asked, keen to be reassured that sticking to daylight was a good recipe for roo-avoidance. "5am," replied the Aussie woman, "and I was doing 110km/h. I didn't stop, 'cos I didn't want to look at the front and see bits of roo sticking out." She didn't seem too perturbed about the incident - which took place a few days ago - but reported that her 8-month-old puppy had been off its food for a couple of days, so traumatised was it by the event.
So, by my reckonings, that will bring the roo-kill count up to 501 after all.