The 550km drive to Coober Pedy is a long way through nothing. The 1600km across the Nullabor Plain might possibly drive you insane if you don’t have company or a very full MP3 player. Starting at Port Augusta, it is not long before you’re once again in the middle of nowhere. The towns you can see on the map don’t look far apart (they are) and you’d hope they’re well populated (they’re not) with lots of shops for bored travellers – most are simply a roadhouse with a toilet, waiting to prey on those stupid enough to need petrol out here.
The first day took us from PA to Ceduna. The weather was gloomy, and there was on/off rain for much of the day. It’s quite surreal travelling across nothing, and while the passenger buries their head in a book and listens to music, the driver has to keep those beady eyes open for kangaroos crossing the road (they make an awful mess of themselves and the car), and for other drivers.
The other drivers are what keep the journey interesting. In the middle of nowhere, driver etiquette starts to become an obsession. After a certain distance away from PA, it’s considered good manners to give a cheery wave to oncoming drivers, sort of a secret handshake for those stupid enough to travel this length of highway. What you tend to find is that most people towing a caravan will wave, and the older they are the more likely a wave is to come. Younger guys and gals in sportier cars tend not to wave, though occasionally those towing trailers are sneaky and can wave unexpectedly. Road train drivers are a 50-50 guess, though this is also complicated by the height of the cabs which means that often you can’t see them wave if they do, and sometimes they can’t see you wave from way down there, so you need to wave early if you’re gonna. Do you see how this starts to become a sport to a very bored driver?
Now I’m not the sort of guy to give away a free wave if I’m not going to get one back in return, and I feel very guilty if someone waves without giving me the chance to wave back (I must appear so heartless) so the second I see headlights in the distance, I start the mental preparation. Is it a car or a truck? Towing? Once they’re a few hundred yards away, can we distinguish what colour their hair is? Do they have hair? Is that a bald old man or a young guy with his head shaved? When they’re close enough, do you take the chance and wave, assuming that you’ve got it correct, or do you just try and ignore them, hoping that they think you didn’t see them? You tend to make eye contact with a lot of them, so do you really want to take off your sunglasses and risk full eye contact with someone who waves at you, but you fail to wave at them? Can you risk that level of guilt? Can you buddy? Huh?
This is what I do for three fricking days. Every time a car appears on the horizon, my heart starts beating fast, the hands start shaking and a wave of fear passes through me. Cat on the other hand, couldn’t give a monkeys about any of this, and gleefully waves at everything and everyone – she even practises waving when no one is around, though she insists she’s just stretching her wrists after a couple of hours of continuous driving. By the end of the three days her wave has evolved into something between the Queen (‘One is delighted to see your car here, and wishes all its occupants Godspeed’) and the Fonz (‘Ayyyyyyyyyyyy’).
We stop at the Ceduna Airport Caravan Park. Ceduna consists of 10 people, a shop, a bank and 4 million petrol stations, each one with more exorbitant prices than the last. Why the hell does it need an airport? How many planes could possibly land here? The caravan park is the cheapest in the book, so we drive in and pay up.
We are fools. This is not a caravan park – it is the Twilight Zone. We see maybe 2 or 3 other people, mostly hiding in the shadows, often out of the corner of your eye. They seem to have extra limbs, and some emit strange cries. The only other campers who arrive decide to park next to us, presumably hoping that there is safety in numbers. Otherwise the place is deserted. Except for the surrounding lands. We are next to the highway, which is a continuous stream of very loud road trains. The railway line, which traditionally only has one train every four years, is situated at the edge of the park, and we seem to have arrived in the middle of a festival of loud and long trains, and they honk long and hard, as if drivers and pedestrians could miss a train the size of the Great Wall of China moving across a completely flat plain. Not to mention the airport. Despite the fact that no one lives here and no one visits, the airport is apparently the third busiest in the world, with planes coming in at every hour, all of which fly directly over the caravan park. Extraordinary.
To add to this, the ‘camp kitchen’ is a tin shack (well roof really) divided into three parts. It has no solid walls front or rear, so the wind whistles through merrily. The first section contains a sink, a fridge (working thankfully) and table and chairs. The second contains a pot-belly stove (no wood), chairs, and a TV from 1945, which emits a hum when I turn it on, then the screen turns a shade just off purple, and then it just stops. I unplug it, fearing explosion. The third section contains a single wooden chair, with a shovel leaning against it. I simply cannot imagine what the purpose of this particular room was, but the image will haunt me to my dying day. We made the world’s worst chicken curry in the world’s worst kitchen, then returned to the car and locked ourselves in.
The next day’s driving included a stop at the Head of the Bight. The Bight is the thousands of kilometres of bay stretching along the south of Australia, and at this time of year is the perfect place to see the migrating Southern Right Whales. It is a gloriously sunny day, and having been trapped in a toasty car for a couple of hours, I cannot imagine it being cold and blowing a Force 10 gale down by the coast. When we reach the coastline, I am surprised to find that it is cold and blowing a Force 10 gale. I do not have a coat, and with a sprinkling of rain added to the mix, I am expecting nature to provide me with a pod of 40-50 whales, doing synchronised displays and making hilarious whale-like noises to repay me for my commitment. After 30 minutes of staring at water, I can just make out a tail, about half a mile off shore. We watch the tail with joy in our hearts for about 30 minutes before coming to the conclusion that no matter how watched it gets, it will not come any closer, and we will not see any more of the whale at all, no matter how much I scream obscenities at it.
We conclude our day at Border Village, the last outpost in South Australia. This place doesn’t even bother with a camp kitchen, so we just chuck the camp stove on the ground and cook up some soup for the night, then head into the roadhouse for a couple of well-earned beers. A couple of hard fought games of pool later, we head back to the car. We remember this particular site for the wonderful message on the door of the toilet block – ‘Keep doors closed for your convenience’, printed above the photograph of a very friendly looking snake. Without fail, every time I visit the gents, the fucking door has been left open by some muppet, which leads me to a terrifying search of every toilet and shower cubicle before the ablutions begin. I never actually reached the stage of working out what I was going to do if I found a snake, but I sense a vigorous shouting and running strategy would be the key to victory.
The next day we fuelled up (daylight bloody robbery by this point), crossed the border into Western Australia (the border guard checked our Eski for illegal fruits and vegetables, as you do) and headed off for the longest single day of driving. By this point the road signs are warning you of kangaroos, wombats and camels crossing the road for the next 300km. Sadly, we never encountered the latter two, but after a heavy shower in the afternoon, Cat drove us through a nightmare stretch of road where the kangaroos had all come out to drink water from the pools that had collected on the road. You have to crawl along to give them the chance to move, and several head off one way only to double back so they can keep up with the rest of the family. When you see the size of the biggies, you start to understand why people do not drive when it gets dark – you’re not gonna have much of a car left after a high speed collision, and this is the last place in the world you want to be stuck without wheels or a phone signal.
We made our final stop by about 2pm, not because of speedy driving, but because the clocks go back by 90 minutes when you cross the border (for some reason South Australia doesn’t have a 1 hour time difference with the states either side, instead changing its clocks by 30 minutes from NSW time and 90 minutes from WA time, presumably due to some sort of mass brain damage). So we head off from the roadhouse, stopping only to fill up from our otherwise unused jerry can, and make it to Norseman by sunset. And that is pretty much the end of the Nullabor Plain. Cat had the honour of driving the longest straight section of road in Australia, about 190km without a bend – it even has a sign to tell you, but quite who stops to pose in front of a sign that should read “So you didn’t think we could make it any more boring?” is quite beyond me.
