Across the Nullarbor

I am writing this at Eucla, WA, almost on the South Australian border, and we are most definitely on our way home!

As we turned east at Norseman after a lovely couple of days at Kalgoorlie, we were completely in agreement that we were gorged out, wild flowered out, and mined out. We love Western Australia, but like a pair of horses sniffing the water of home, we have put our heads down, and if not actually bolting for home, we are well on our way.

Kalgoorlie is a great city, and we had a most interesting tour of the Superpit (below) that lasted 2.5 hours. It even took us part way into the pit, and around the intricate machinery of the extraction mill. We polished off the day with a great meal at one of the many big old pubs in the main Hannan Street, named for Paddy Hannan, who had started the gold rush there. The restaurant in the pub was, appropriately, called Paddy’s.

There are some great buildings in the city, not the least of which is the court house, with its dome gilded with 23-carat gold leaf only a few years ago. It really is a golden city and we saw a lot of it, despite a cold wind blowing night and day and some very low temperatures.

The morning we left, we simply woke, showered, packed up and were out of there early, intending to stop along the way for breakfast. But as we neared the little roadhouse at Widgiemooltha (now there’s a name for you) we decided to let them do the cooking, so had bacon and egg toasted sandwiches with big mugs of tea. That area is all part of the gold history of the region too, as two brothers in 1931 had unearthed what was known as the Golden Eagle nugget, measuring 26 inches long and worth five thousand pounds in those Depression days. The roadhouse has a much enlarged model of the nugget outside as a talking point.

John took the Nullarbor photo used on the back of

the truck in 2006, and it's much the same,

just greener.

Once we had driven south to Norseman, we turned east and were on the Eyre Highway. The first night we pulled into a bush camp area which soon had about a dozen vehicles scattered among the trees and shrubs. This second night, we are at Eucla caravan park, high on an escarpment overlooking the sea.

Ceduna:

Now we are in Ceduna, having crossed the Nullarbor. The highlight of our last leg yesterday from Eucla was the Head of the Bight, where whales come in their dozens to rest and play before heading south into Antarctic waters. We stayed there for quite a while, marvelling in the antics of the females and their calves. One big girl turned on her back, with her flukes in the air, and we thought maybe that was to allow the calf to feed, but an interpretive sign above the superb boardwalk on which visitors can descend the cliff to be close to the water told us it’s the opposite. It’s to keep males away, and also to prevent the calf feeding, so maybe she was in the process of weaning it.

The whale on her back with calf to the left.

As soon as we reached Ceduna, we had to stop at the quarantine station. We discarded some tomatoes we hadn’t managed to finish, but all other fruit and vegetables we’d scoffed beforehand. We had some printed info that also said honey was not allowed in, so we’d forced ourselves to have honey on our lunchtime bread rolls, just to finish a jar off . . . and then the nice quarantine man said that only applied to Kangaroo Island, so we needn’t have bothered!

The day was the warmest we’d had for weeks, with no wind (at last) so we stripped down to shorts and t-shirts once we reached our foreshore caravan park and enjoyed the sunset over the bay. But the forecast rain started around 3am and today is just totally miserable. We are almost in the town’s CBD so have walked to the info centre, which has a book exchange, and then the supermarket. Right next door is a big hotel where we plan a seafood lunch and after that we’ll just hunker down with books and tourism brochures about the rest of the Eyre Peninsula. When we arrived in town yesterday afternoon, the first thing we did was call at the oyster bar on the outskirts to buy some oysters, as the town is famous for them and has an oyster festival early in October. The oysters were fresh and sweet . . . but the person opening them had left lots of shell grit in them, so not the best oyster feast we’ve ever had.

Never mind . . . we move on to Coffin Bay tomorrow, and that’s equally famous for its oysters.