Day 68-70. 11th - 13th July 2024. Nullabor - Caiguna / Eucla / Nullarbor Roadhouse. Taking a bight.

The Nullarbor crossing was one of the reasons we wanted to do this trip. Whether or not we wanted to do it twice determined which way we went to get to WA. We decided the treeless plain would be well covered with the one crossing, which was why initially we headed North and do a lap rather than covering the same ground twice.

Heading north from the beauty of Esperance, we took a 575k drive which passed fleetingly through Norseman, slightly longer in Balladonia and then settled in Caiguna 7.5 hours or so after we set off. As part of the 575ks, we drove on the longest straight piece of road in Australia. The trip from Balladonia to Eucla required no turning of the steering wheel at all, other than to pull over and change drivers. In Melbourne, the entrance ramp to Citlink from Footscray Rd. is engineered to go in a near perfect circle so that you turn your steering wheel 45 degrees and hold it there for the duration of the circular on ramp. This is similar, but you turn the steering wheel 0 degrees for 155ks.

Norseman was good for a toilet stop, but Balladonia held my attention for a bit longer. 45 years ago almost to the day, America decided to litter outback WA with one of it’s satellites known as Skylab. There was quite a bit of it scattered about south eastern WA, so the Mayor of Esperance issued the USA a $400 fine for littering. For a short while, this remote area of Australia was the focus of the world as bits of metal rained down upon them. A suitably crappy replica of Skylab was in the museum for the obligatory photo.

Caiguna Roadhouse was our resting place for the night, and it should be well known now that a “Roadhouse” means dustbowl accommodation behind a servo. Please add that after rain, it becomes a mud bath. We managed to get the last dry powered area while others arriving later did have to park in some large puddles. However, they did have a bar that was warm, so we had a couple of beers until it was time to retire to the van and close out the world. Cheese and biscuits in bed with internet TV and some chocolate for dessert made the night OK. Also 4 blankets, thermal pants and top, and now adding in tracky daks, long sleeved camping shirt and beanie to the night attire to keep us reasonably warm. My $2 “thermal socks” impulse purchase from a discount store in Esperance have also been worth every one of those 200 cents I paid for them.

Caiguna is on the border of a unique time phenomena. East Caiguna (which is just the left side of the servo) is the unofficial official starting place of Central West Australian time. Between Caiguna and the border, there is a sign to adjust your clocks by 45 minutes. For the un-initiated, the time difference between WA and SA is 1.5 hours, and two hours to Victoria. When we crossed the border from NT to WA, the clock changed by 1.5 hours. Directly south however, there is a Central West Australian time that adjusts by 45 minutes. The creation of it dates back to when WA and SA looked after the telegraph station in Eucla, and it made it easier for the workers to have an intermediate time as they travelled across the borders. The automatic updates on the phone were interesting to watch (ha!) as Linda at one stage took a photo time stamped 45 minutes into the future of what her phone was saying. Our phones were showing different times at different stages, and my Telstra one didn’t update until we were at Eucla the next day. The time change makes sense, but a bit crazy that it doesn’t extend all the way north to Kununurra and Lake Argyle – remember our 2:30 start time for a sunset cruise? I think it also may be the only time change that is done that is not a full half hour, and I read that the WA government doesn’t actually recognise it.

Another 330 k’s the next day to Eucla got us along the road a bit, and we start to see what we came for. The Great Australian Bight. We take a drive down to the Old Telegraph Station ruins being overrun by sand dunes and a 1k walk to the beach. The bight and Jetty ruin leaves you breathless. The cliffs at this stage are yet to appear, but the expanse of beach along the coastline and the expansiveness of the ocean is something else to take in. The van was parked with a view of the coast and we sat in our chairs that night looking at the stars, having a drink and shivering from the cold. We are now only 12 k’s from SA, and the next day is only a two hour trip to the Nullabor Roadhouse but with a number of stop offs at rest areas to take in the view.

The first stop in the morning is at the border quarantine station. Not because we had to get checked going into SA – their quarantine control station is 500ks down the road in Ceduna. We took the obligatory photo of the border sign and a photo of a giant kangaroo statue holding a jar of Vegemite. It could only be more Aussie if he had a can of Aerogard and was eating an emu burger. Very naff.

There are four stops along the way and each cliff view gets better and better. It is literally the hard edge of Australia. I can’t say much more to describe it justly, you will have to check out the photo’s on Linda’s gallery to get some sense of how spectacular this is.

After checking into the Roadhouse dustbowl, we get back into the car for 20 minutes for our last viewing of the day: Bunda Cliffs. This area is a whale sanctuary, and you walk out onto two boardwalks to not only take in more views of the power of the ocean, the sheer cliffs being eroded away and the vastness of space itself, but you can watch 10 whales frolicking right there in front of you. Breeches, tail slaps, a mother and a calf just doing their thing. No one chasing them on boats or snorkelling around them – just them there doing whale things like whales have done for centuries. An absolute highlight of the trip.

The Nullarbor Roadhouse did have a nice enough bar, so I was able to set up the laptop and watch the Bulldogs tear Carlton apart, and Linda and I had dinner there as well. The Roadhouse strategy is to keep outside basic and the inside warm with decent meals and cold beers. I see your strategy and succumb to it.

The final Nullarbor leg was 300ks to Ceduna. We drove off in a veil of mist at 8 in the morning and drove through treeless plains, into farmland and then into towns. While there are no trees on the Nullarbor, there are millions of small shrubs with billions of unseen spiders that have laid down their webs. The dew on the ground was substantial, and as the droplets clung to usually invisible threads, the morning sun burned through the fog to create a landscape of glitterballs. Fog, rain, clear skies got us to Penong and a Windmill museum. This is worth noting as they had Australia’s largest windmill on display. Impressive in breadth, at full pelt this mill to the grindstone would definitely be going at 13 to the dozen.

Nullarbor facilities: Roadhouses are usually best left to the truckies, and when the showers are activated by inserting $2 coins to make them work, you would need to make sure that you are appropriately cashed up. Caiguna had the money box on the outside of the shower putting pressure on making sure you are done and rinsed quickly. Eucla was more a caravan park, and provided a surprisingly good shower. Feeding in a coin was like playing a poker machine and the jackpot was hot water. Recommendation is to shower well before and after the Nullarbor, enjoy Eucla and don’t even think that you would enter the shower dungeons of dirt and mould. 3/10