Sunrise saw us up and on the move again.
An uneventful, but chilly night was had. Road trains come past roughly every 20 minutes. I’m guessing that it takes about that long to get each one through the border checkpoint.
Today was a pretty long driving day with even less than yesterday to see. The Nullarbor was in full flight today with absolutely no trees and not much of anything else to see. The few small roadhouses along the way are gone in an instant and there’s nothing missed if you don’t stop.
We did stop at Caiguna to see the cave blowhole there … but it wasn’t blowing. Seemed like a nice enough spot for lunch though.
Just after Caiguna is Australia’s longest straight stretch of road at 146.6 kms. It’s certainly straight, but there’s plenty of undulation there to assist keeping your sanity. The truckies were on the radio warning of dangerous sharp turns ahead and suggesting that it’d be a good time to see just how good the wheel alignment really is.
Sign at the Eastern end
Sign at the Western end
All good fun and ya do need something to pass the time. The game of I-spy was tragically cut short during the first round. I-spy something beginning with F. Many guesses were had and plenty of theorizing … but once the answer of F-all was discovered, nobody was in the mood anymore. I mean there’s bushes, dirt, rocks and road … it was always doomed to failure.
The only real stop we had was at Balladonia, just after the finish of the actual Nullarbor. They’ve got a bit of a museum there and some dubious parts of SkyLab too … but most importantly a cappuccino machine! 2 cappuccino’s, some cookies and mega pythons and we were again on our way.
I’d read about a few stops along the way that weren’t in the camps book that were worth seeing and Newman Rocks was one of them. That was what we’d tentatively put in the GPS at the start of the day. There were a couple of spots before there though that we pulled into. One was just a truck stop right on the side of the road … no thanks. Another was a truck stop that had a bit of a maze of tracks behind it that at 3pm was already filling up with overnighters. 3rd time lucky we hoped and continued on to Newman Rocks.
I dunno whether I got my wires crossed somewhere, but I thought that Newman Rocks was something to be climbed. I wanted to get there early enough to be able to get some photos from the top looking back across the Nullarbor. When we got there though the campsite was just a truck stop and not worth stopping at. A bit of a poke around soon found a track leading into the scrub that looked promising. We followed it in for about 2km and passed by a few potential campsites before we found Newman Rocks … we had driven on to the top of it! You can camp right on top if you like, but as its a huge slab of granite, way up high … it tends to get a bit windy.
We kept following a few other tracks around the area and ended up finding a great spot out of the wind with a ready made campfire place. So that was where we stayed. We had about an hour before sunset so rather than sightsee, the kids and I set about collecting firewood. There was tons of old tea-tree like stuff around but not much substantial. We collected a huge pile of the bigger stuff but once the fire was lit it was a log every 15-20 minutes as the wood was that dried up. Lotsa coals made it pretty warm even the next morning.
Once the wood supply ran out and the rain had begun, we bid a hasty retreat to the van and called it a night. It had been a long couple of days and a good nights sleep was in order.
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