Wednesday, November 23, 2011

AND back to our trip... The Nullarbor

Sorry for the long hiatus, and emotional upchuck that was the last post. Now that the semester's over, and you haven't heard a word about what's happened these past 5 months, it's time to catch up (now that I HAVE time). Starting where we left off on our trip:

The Nullarbor!


We left Ceduna, the last main town before the Nullarbor, and drove. There are some tree-like shrubs and some trees for a while

before you hit the sign that says:


and then it's null arbor (no trees) for a long ways. We were told we must stop at the Head of the Bight, so we did so. It's a great spot to see Southern Right Whales, and boy did we! They said that day they had spotted about 15, and we saw at least 5 or 6 ourselves. There was at least one that we could tell was a mother and baby, it was just amazing! Such a beautiful area too.

You can see 3 whales in this picture







We ate lunch there and started off again, and it wasn't a whole lot later that we needed to stop for gas (or petrol as they call it here), which as you can see was the highest price probably of anywhere in Australia! (it equals about $6/gallon)




Luckily at the start of the Nullarbor is where it's the most expensive, from there on out it was cheaper (however, we were still excited to see $1.70/litre when normally, in cities, you can get as cheap as $1.30/litre).

We stopped at a few spots, and saw some lovely rainbows, and some dingos, but overall there aren't a whole lot of places to stop, so we decided that in order to be able to spend more of our time around southwestern WA, we were going to drive all night through the Nullarbor. After the WA border (where we had to get rid of any fresh fruits and veggies as well as honey) We stopped at twilight at a place called Eucla, mainly to stop so we weren't in danger of hitting kangaroos but we then found out there was a famous old telegraph station down by the beach. We drove down there got out and walked to it and down to the beach. I should mention too that at pretty much every stop we would see the same people, cause everyone pretty much stops at the same places, cause they are the only places to stop! It was kind of neat, we were like a big family driving separately across the desert. :P We talked to some guys that were hitchhiking with an older gentleman for a ways (they had hitchhiked all the way from Melbourne I think). After it was sufficiently dark we went back out onto the road and David drove until we had to stop for a sleep (my eyes were being pansies and I didn't trust them to drive, so it was mostly David).












When we woke up we drove to the next gas station to gas/freshen up then headed on to Norseman.