Well we got out of Ceduna bright and early and headed off towards the SA/WA border. There’s not a lot to see along the way, but there’s plenty of expectation.
We saw the famous signs warning of camels, wombats, kangaroos, etc for the next bajillion kms, but we saw nothing. Not even a dead roo. The only birds around seem to be crows and some parrots that won’t sit still long enough to be identified. A bit eerie really.
The clear highlight of the day was reaching Head of Bight which coincided nicely with lunch. Clear skies and little wind made for good whale watching weather. There’s boardwalks along the cliffs and down fairly close to the water too. We saw about 15 Southern Right whales all up. Mothers, calves and bulls all acting as whales do.
I took about 250 photos and some video and will need to pick some highlights for the gallery here.
One interesting one was a baby white whale. I thought that a white whale was the stuff of legend … but here he is. The whales are close enough to hear them … supposed to be a bit haunting of an evening to hear them chatting away to each other. But we had to keep on truckin’ !
Speaking of trucks, we’ve seen no super huge road trains yet. Plenty of B-triples and ones with 3 normal trailers too … and they fly. Had oodles pass us going the other way and had a couple pass us going the same way too. Just gotta move over as much as possible and let em thru … they’ve got plenty of time to do it, but I let em know on the radio that I’d back off once they pulled alongside to make it a bit safer.
I tried keeping up with one, in the hope that he’d just suck me along in his wake … and that does work for awhile … got good fuel economy too … until a bit of a hill sees them winning the horsepower race and I’m back on pure Prado power again.
Miles of not bloody much to see
We got to the border and got some fuel, took some photos and went through the checkpoint. They had a good look over the car and van and didn’t find anything we shouldn’t have – except some spuds. I thought we were allowed to take peeled spuds through, but it’s only frozen, peeled spuds that are allowed … and these weren’t frozen. No big deal.
We pulled into Eucla and debated whether to stay there the night, but it was only 2 pm after the clock change, so it seemed a bit silly. Plenty of sunlight left in the day so we kept going.
We did duck down to have a look at the Telegraph station ruins before continuing on though.
The first likely campsite we had a look at seemed OK, but the next was supposed to be better, so we went the extra 20kms to see. Well, it wasn’t better really … a bit of rubbish around and also it didn’t look like anybody else would be camping there either.
The next campsite was a further 64km away and was going to be pushing it to get there and setup before dark. So … we went back to a Telstra repeater station that I saw off the road between the two campsites. A quick investigate revealed that there was a rockhole behind it that we could park in for the night and be well out of sight of any passing traffic. So that was settled.
Kel was a bit concerned, but there was nothing to be concerned about. A basic setup, with the Prado still attached to the van saw beers in hand well before sundown. We tried to collect some firewood from the area but there just wasn’t anything substantial to be found. Since we were still mentally on SA time it was an early night.
We had a full moon and only light cloud. Even so, due to the full moon, there weren’t many stars to spot. It’s a bit spooky out here at night.
Camera sitting on the highway
Campsite by moonlight
[sgpx gpx=”/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/2011-07-17.gpx”]