Goodbye WA, hello SA (the long straight drive east - part 2)

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Day 61 – Wednesday 29^th August - Moodini Bluff (WA) to Tcharkuldu Rock, Minnipa (SA)

The weird thing I forgot to mention yesterday is that there is a 45 minute time difference when you pass into Caiguna from the West. Officially there is a 1.5 hour time difference between South and Western Australia but this little time zone took us by surprise. The 45 minute time advance didn’t mean that much to us as we don’t have to go to work tomorrow or catch a plane but it was unexpected.

At 7am, or maybe it was 7.45am, there was little action in the rest area as the grey nomads seemed to be having a lie in. After a quick breakfast we packed away and hit the road at what might have been 8.15am, but who really knows? More straight road driving across the Nullarbor plain. Have we said yet that Nullarbor means ‘no trees’? It feels like a misnomer because for lots of the stretch of the road across the bottom of Australia there are indeed trees. But there are also long patches of scrubland with not much to look at. Apart from the odd town with a golf hole as the major attraction.

At Eucla, further on and the border town between Western Australia and South Australia (the time was now officially another 45 minutes advanced to be on Australian Central Standard time, half an hour behind Melbourne time), we decided not to fill up with diesel at $1.88/litre and drove straight past the petrol station intending to fill up on the border. Mistake. The diesel price on the border was $1.96/litre. It was daylight robbery, but we had fallen into the trap and had to pay for it. So we got half a tank of fuel, enough to get us to the town of Ceduna, where we felt we would get a much more competitive price for fuel. At the border crossing there is a quarantine point checking for and confiscating fresh fruit and veg. We were ready for this check and had been eating carrots, apples and tomatoes since yesterday afternoon so we would not have our fresh fruit and veg confiscated again. However, the joke was on us because the check was only for vehicles crossing in the other direction (East to West) and we had stuffed ourselves with vitamins and fibre for apparently no reason. Nearly forgot to mention the Big Kangaroo at Border Village where we got fuel, standing guard over the par 3, 160m “Border Kangaroo” hole of the Nullarbor Links golf course. You’ve got to love Australia!

Next stop after the border was Ceduna. We had been told about the famous fresh oysters at Ceduna and had planned a little stop here mid afternoon, before heading further east. As we got closer to Ceduna the sky got darker and darker and it began to rain. There was another quarantine check for vehicles heading East and it was here that we were stripped of the one remaining apple and half a packet of salad that we hadn’t managed to eat until now. Never mind, it had been a good effort on our part and we had not been ambushed by the quarantine officers in Ceduna! On the downside it was now raining heavily and the wind was very cool and gusting strongly. Yuk – not exactly great weather for our planned oyster picnic at the beach. Nonetheless we stopped at the oyster bar on the border and bought a dozen freshly shucked oysters for $11.50. For the kids we picked up a $5 pack of chips and we did indeed have a very quick picnic on the sea front at Ceduna. Hooray. But we were glad to get back into the car and escape the wind and rain! Oh yes, the fuel price at Ceduna was a reasonable $1.51/litre.

We decided to drive for another hour before stopping and had identified a bush campsite 90 minutes away as the place to stop tonight. Just before sunset we arrived at Tcharkuldu Rock campsite just outside of Minnipa and set up camp for the night. The sky was dark with clouds but the rain held off for us to have another campfire. The best part of this campground was the absolute classic bush toilet with the words “outback dunny” burnt into the wooden door. Brilliant! We were the only people at the campground and there were no nasty flies or bugs to annoy us. Once we ran out of wood for the campfire we retired to the shelter of the tent and watched another movie on the laptop, ready for the second last day of our trip.

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Photos

The Big Kangaroo at Border Village
We are apparently 1994 km from Melbourne and 1462 kms from Perth

The tee of the "Border Kangaroo" hole on the Nullarbor Golf Links
160m par 3, in case you are interested!