The Nullarbor Plains

The Treeless Plain

Is the Nullarbor a Treeless Plain? In a word…Nope. However, it is a very, very…very long road. Starting at Ceduna in SA and finishing at Norseman in WA. The road across the Nullarbor Plain (the Eyre Hwy) stretches for 1,201 kilometres. Just to put this in context, and for friends and family in the UK, that’s the equivalent of driving from Southampton to John O’Groats, (the southern end of the UK to northernmost part) 1128 kilometers. You can easily drive across in two days, most caravanners take a comfortable three days to drive from Ceduna to Norseman. It took us nine.

No we don’t drive that slow, but if we find somewhere nice to stay…we stay.

There are no towns as such on the Nullarbor, but there are several small roadhouse communities along the way. Penong, Nundroo, Yalata, Nullarbor and Border Village in South Australia. Then in Western Australia you have, Eucla, Mundrabilla, Madura, Cocklebiddy, Caiguna and Balladonia.

You can get fuel at all of these roadhouses, (check your fuel prices before if you can, it isn’t cheap) most have a caravan park attached, a couple have pubs, and of course, your typical roadhouse food. The traffic you see are mostly RV’s and big rigs. We thought ours was big until we pulled up next to this guy. Actually this B-Double is just a little guy against some of the sixty metre long, 200 tonne three and four trailer road trains we saw.

Apart from the roadhouses, there really is no reason for stopping. Unless…unless your name is Peter, and you decide to climb the one hill on the Nullarbor. Granted it was a big, long hill, and it did deserve climbing. Peter’s hill turned out to be part of the Fraser Range, halfway between Balladonia and Norseman.

If you’re going to get a flat tyre, you might as well get one in the middle of the Nullarbor. We did. We pulled over into an overnight camp, not far from Madura. Peter got us set up with the levelers under a wheel, and I went inside to take a couple of beers from the fridge and into the freezer (we like them frosty). By the time the beer was icy, Chunky Bum had developed a definite lean. Hugo went to check the situation.

Our Oricom tyer pressure monitor confirmed our predicament, the bottom left reading shows our flat tyre’s pressure. Knowing how accurate it is was reassuring, had we still been driving, an alarm would have sounded long before the pressure got that low.

So, what did we do? Well, we did what any good, self-sufficient Aussie would do. We dropped the legs on the van, enjoyed our beers and left the job for tomorrow. 😉 This was our first flat since we’ve been travelling, but we handled it well and within a few hours, (the following day) were all done.

We did have one problem that nearly stopped us in our tracks. Our spare is secured with a bicycle security chain. With the many hundreds of kilometers of dirt road we’d travelled, and even though we have a cover on the spare wheel, the locking mechanism was clogged full of dirt.

It took us a while, but with our Ryobi blower, a toothbrush and a paperclip, we managed to clear the keyhole so we were able to unlock the spare. To prevent this from happening again, I put a thick cover of glad wrap, held in place with a hair tie, over the lock. Yes I know, neither of us have hair long enough for hair ties, but they have a million other uses.

We would have fixed it sooner, but we had a novice mechanic helping. And I use that term loosely. He spent more time playing than working, and he paid for it in the end.

With the tyre fixed we got back on the road, and here we are, in the middle of the longest straight road on the planet (according to wiki).  We drove for 146.6 kilometers in a completely straight line between Caiguna and Balladonia. No bends nor curves; make sure you have plenty of coffee, or some stimulating conversation, or some loud music or, all of the above. 😊

I think every Australian should drive the Nullarbor; it is a bit of a rite of passage. No, it was not what we expected, no desert, no stretches of vast nothingness, but an experience non the less. We should also hold in mind the fact that the drive across the Nullarbor (the Eyre Hwy) follows the southern-most edge of the Nullarbor Plain which extends hundreds of kilometres to the north and that really is a lot more desert-like.

See you out there somewhere

On tow and on the go!