Yesterday was another big day on the road and believe it or not, I didn’t take even one photo.
During my research for this trip, I had read about a dirt road which runs pretty much in a straight line from Esperance to Balladonia.
Apparently, along this track, there are at least a couple of deserted properties with old sandstone buildings which looked like they would have made excellent photographic material.
But, like in prior towns, I made a call on the Boys in Blue to see what their thoughts were on the condition of the road. Reports on various web fora were extremely polarised.
The local cop asked me what I was driving.
“A Nissan X-Trail”, I said.
“Don’t even think about it” was the reply.
He went on to explain that this track would take 10,000 k’s off the life of my car, and that there was only one tow truck operator in Esperance and he WOULD charge me $1000 to come and get me unstuck if it all went pear-shaped. And just in case this wasn’t enough warning, he also recommended not doing the track unless you a) had a SERIOUS 4 wheel drive vehicle, fully spec’d out with extra water tanks and good off-road tyres, and b) were travelling in tandem with another similarly equipped vehicle.
Looks like we ain’t doing the track then.
Bugger. I was really looking forward to that.
So, we ended up driving north to Norseman, hangin’ a right onto the Eyre Highway and heading out through Balladonia and on to Madura Pass for the night.
By this stage,we were starting to seriously tire of the rigmarole of erecting the tent every night, only to have to pack it all away again the next morning.
So, when we got to Madura Pass, we went soft and booked a budget room in the motel for the night.
Today, we departed Madura Pass with a view to reaching Ceduna by night fall.
But, there is a detour to be made along the way. More on that in a bit.
One of the more unusual sights out here is the Royal Flying Doctor Service landing strips… ON THE HIGHWAY!
Outside each of these small towns across the Nullarbor is a straight stretch of the highway, usually at least 1km in length, with the big white stripes you see on airport runways painted at each end. Signs alert drivers to the fact. In the event of an accident (motor, or otherwise), the injured person/people are relocated to the nearest town, the RFDS is called in, the cops go out and stop the traffic, the plane lands, picks up its cargo, take off, and the highway is re-opened.
Here’s the RFDS landing strip just west of Eucla.
Like I said, not the kind of thing you see every day.
Anyway, the reason I’m telling you this is because we started joking about how these were pedestrian crossings. Hey, give us a break… we’ve been on the road for a while, ok? 🙂
And of course, that very quickly led to the idea of shooting a photo like the cover of the Beatles’ album “Abbey Road”.
So, we did that.
And then, while I was packing my camera away, Cath and Max were looking at the ground and found that it was littered with sea shells.
Remember, we are now down on the coastal plain, having come down through Madura Pass, but we’re still a good 15km from the coast.
But of course, hundreds of thousands of years ago, this part of the country was still the bed of the ocean.
A bit later on, we saw another wedge-tailed eagle feeding on some fresh roadkill. We pulled up and he immediately flew off, but came to rest on a tree about 100 metres away. I thought I might as well see how close he’d let me get for a portrait. As it turned out, only to within about 50 metres. At that point, he took to the wing, and I started firing off a heap of frames.
The image you see here represents perhaps 10% of the pixels from the whole frame. I’ve had to crop a long way to get this much. About the only time I’ve been truly thankfully for that 24 megapixel sensor and it’s stupidly large RAW files!
So, that “detour” I mentioned.
One of my work colleagues had mentioned a place called Koonalda Homestead, situated in the middle of nowhere about 15km north of the Eyre Highway about 85km east of the WA/SA border.
While it’s the middle of nowhere TODAY, it is just a couple of hundred metres from the OLD Eyre Highway (the dirt track which was the only route across the Nullarbor until the mid-70’s when the new bitumen highway was laid down). As well as the old homestead, there is also a graveyard of maybe 100 old cars which never made it across the country.
This was something I wanted to experience while we were out in this neck of the woods.
So, Cath set about making us some lunch while Max and I walked around exploring the ruins and the wrecks.
The great thing about this place is that no one is going to discover it by accident. Unless someone tells you about it, you’d never know to look for it. And that means that the people who DO come out here respect it. So there’s no grafitti to be seen anywhere, thankfully.
But what an incredible snapshot of Australian outback life!
I could have quite happily stayed all afternoon and spent the night there, and made the most of the “golden hour”, but unfortunately, we HAVE to be in Port Augusta by tomorrow night (New Year’s Eve), and staying at Koonalda would rob us of about 500km of travel today and make tomorrow an impossibly long day.
So, alas, we said farewell to Koonalda and pushed on to Ceduna which yielded another magnificent sunset!
