We woke up to the sounds of the caravan park maintenance man hammering something loudly next to our van and left Streaky Bay without even partaking in our morning coffee ritual. We drove on to Smoky Bay, a gorgeous little oyster village and stopped next to the beach to make coffee and cook up some scrambled tofu for breaky. And then we were off. The scenery varied a little and we did take in some incredible sights, most notably the majestic wedge tail eagles, but all in all it was straight road and small bushes the whole way. We kept snapping off photos intermittently to document the road and how little it changed! Before the official beginning of the Nullarbor we stopped and cooked ourselves up an incredibly gourmet feed of smoked salmon pasta from some whole salmon we bought at a cute little store near Port Augusta that sold all sorts of locally caught smoked fish and jars of pickled everything. Honestly, you name it, they pickled it! Then we drove forever, past lots of nothing and signs telling us to watch out for Camels, Emus and Kangaroos, then signs telling us to watch out for what might have been bulls or buffalo, we didn’t see either so we’re not quite sure! We started to get excited about the dots on the map, thinking a nice little town would be an interesting change of scenery, but it seems that it doesn’t take much to create a dot on a map of the Nullarbor!
Names of “towns” like Yalata and Nullarbor were actually nothing more than Roadhouses with a few motel rooms attached to them. We finally crossed the border into WA and had to surrender all our fruit and vegies to quarantine – note to travellers: don’t stock up on kilos of oranges and bulk bags of garlic and onion and then travel into another state!
As the evening started to set in and the kangaroos became a threat we decided to pull into the next dot on the map, Cocklebiddy. With a population of 6 Cocklebiddy had everything a weary traveller could want – fuel, hot showers, a restaurant, a bar and a dart board. After satisfying our need for the former necessities we grabbed ourselves an Emu Bitter and started chucking darts at the board. It was proven once and for now that I am a better dart chucker than Julz. Unfortunately the night life shuts down pretty early in Cocklebiddy so we retired to the van to make the most of our $16 site. Next stop, Esperance before 5pm Tomorrow!
