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Published: February 6th 2008
Regular readers of our blogs will remember that we asked for ideas for a name for our van. Sheila and Matilda being the most popular, but cliched nominations, we finally settled on Tilly, short for the more common Matilda.
Now we're going to start a new competition. The redback spider that lived in our gas cupboard until we evicted her, well killed her, seems to have left us a present of some babies to adopt. Apparently they produce something like 12 egg sacks, each full of 250 eggs. So we're after about 3,000 names, each preferably starting with R for redback.
The babies all seem to be all doing well (unlike their mother), some are now taking their first wobbly steps into the interior of our van. We were pretty freaked at the idea of a redback living in our cupboard, but every Aussie we've spoke to has been completely unimpressed, and so far from fearing them as spiders of death, we're now quite proud of our new family.
We thought that travelling with a family of redbacks was pretty unusual, but it sits well next to some of our fellow travellers. We're in a bit of a
funny age bracket, most of the other people on the road are either "grey nomad" retirees in half million dollar converted buses with more rooms (and satellite dishes) than some of the villages we've driven through, or pissed up gap year students in beaten up Holdens. Many of the grey nomads are travelling with their pets, and we feel a bit left out not having a dog to accompany us, but we're also met a few cats and even a silk haired Chinese bantum, sort of the poodle of the poultry world, happily pecking away alongside the local seagulls. Lets not even get started on the potplants...
At the end of our last blog we were at Ceduna, at the start of one of the great Australian roadtrips, the 1200 km section of the Eyre Highway across the Nullabor Plain to Norseman. Nullarbor actually comes from Latin, rather than any local aboriginal language, and means "no trees". The aboriginal name for the area is "Oondiri" meaning waterless. Typically for us, towards the end it bloody rained! The first section was actually full of trees, probably the densest forest we've seen so far in our trip, but then as we
Camels Kangaroos and Wombats Next 92km
Not sure how they know they can only go that far!!continued onto the world's biggest lump of limestone, and the Nullabor Plain proper, the road changed to a bleak boring landscape of low saltbush and nothing much else. There being a distinct lack of any sort of live wildlife we started counting dead kangaroos, in one 10km stretch we counted 40. No wonder we saw so few alive!
The first night we spent at a lookout over the the Australian Blight, believed to be the world's longest line of sea cliffs, and the next morning spent half an hour watching half a dozen dolphins playing in the surf. Crossing into Western Australia we threw away our fruit and veg at the quarantine point and carried on to the Madura Roadhouse, our second stop of the trip. From here we drove the "90 Mile Straight", the longest straight section of road in Australia, before calling into the roadhouse at Balladonia. Here in 1979 the American space station "Skylab" crashed to earth earning NASA a $400 fine for littering. They never paid it, but the morning after the crash Jimmy Carter, the then President, personally phoned the roadhouse to apologise and offered to pay for any damage. Disappointingly, the largest bit
The LONG Nullabour highway
At the start of the straight bit! of Skylab on display was a chunk of insulation. From here we carried on to Norseman, named after a prospector's horse that kicked up a lump of gold. The roads here are extra wide to allow for the turning of camel trains years ago. Then we drove on north to Kalgoorlie.
Three Irishmen found gold here in Kalgoorlie by chance in 1893 when one of their horses became lame and they had to rest up for the night. They started a goldrush that continues to this day. The "Golden Mile" seam of gold (the richest seam in the world) is now owned by Kalgoorlie Consolidated Gold Mines, and is the largest gold producing region in Australia. About 800,000 ounces of gold are mined here a year, mostly from the massive Super Pit open-cut mine that has engulfed many smaller previously existing mines. At present the hole in the ground is 410 m deep, 3.2 km long and 1.4 km wide. Its roughly the same size as Ayres Rock, although going into the ground rather than coming out of it. Even looking into it from the public viewing area, its difficult to grasp how massive it is. The trucks hauling
the ore away look tiny, until you realise that the small car parked alongside, but coming up nowhere near the top of the tyres, is actually a large 4x4. Each truck carries 225 tonnes of rock which, if gold bearing ore rather than waste rock, will on average contain about a golf ball size amount of gold.
The twin towns of Kalgoorlie and Boulder are there purely because of the mines, and have grown to a population of about 30,000. Miners being very well paid need to spend their money somewhere, and Kal happily provides for this, with over 30 pubs and at least three legal brothels, two of which give guided tours in the slack daytime period (although Claire wouldn't let me go!). Several of the pubs have blackboard menus outside advertising this weeks special. Its not food they're referring to but "skimpy", the almost naked barmaid who gets paid a little extra to pull pints in her bra and knickers. At closing time they take a beer glass round the customers, Its all about the tips, one publican explained to us. At least, thats what I think he said.
Pulling up in Tilly outside the shops
we realised that we'd been followed by a shaven headed, bearded biker on a Harley. Refusing our wallets and watches, it turned out that Keer had seen our van and it being identical to one that his mate Peta had just bought to do up wanted a look. We ended up having a drink with the two of them in the Metropolitan Hotel, a pub with a glass panel over a 40m mine shaft at the bar, and a beautiful snorting bulldog called Emma. Peta's a sign writer, and we went the next day to her workshop to see her van. Identical to Tilly but not yet kitted out as a camper, hopefully we helped out with a few suggestions. Peta kindly produced a "Tilly" sticker for us, and so finally Tilly now has her name proudly on display. That evening we again met up with Keer and Peta and camped outside Pete's house. She's planning to sell up and drive round the country, so hopefully we'll meet up with her in a few weeks.
We've found that we've seen many of the same faces as we've driven across Australia, either sharing camp sites with travellers we've previously met,
or seeing them parked up as we're leap-frogged past them only to see them pass us the next day. Nirbeeja and Peter from Canberra we first met along the Australian Blight and bumped into them a couple of more times. From Kalgoorlie we retraced our steps down through Norseman, and after a night in Esperance went onto Cape Le Grand National Park where we parked at Lucky Bay, finding ourselves just across the site from Nirbeeja and Pete. We shared meals with them a couple of nights, and they took us up to Frenchman's Peak, a local hill, so we could climb it. They're heading the same way as us, towards Perth, and so I'm sure we'll be regular campsite neighbours. Its good to talk to others doing a similar trip to us and to get their take on whats around. They've been to a lot more National Parks than us, having heard what they've seen and seen their amazing photos, thats what we plan on doing a lot more of.
Lucky Bay was named by Matthew Flinders when he took shelter there during his circumnavigation of Australia in 1802. The beach and sea there are absolutely fantastic. The
Another view of a very long way!
Stare at this photo for 36 hours and you could say you've done the Nullabor!! whitest sand, and the bluest sea we've ever seen in the world. Throw in some coral reef and some turtles like we saw at Sipidan and we'd stay there for life. Its no wonder that so many British settled in Western Australia, if more of the beaches are like this then after a long sea crossing from England we wouldn't have bothered going any further either.
We stayed there for three nights, sharing the campsite with some pretty tame kangaroos. Again with Nirbeeja and Peter we looked at Hellfire Bay which if anything was better than Lucky Bay, smaller with no seaweed (just one part of Lucky Bay being quite seaweedy). We shared our snorkel gear, Nirbeeja having her first attempt and loving it, but there was nothing really to see, just a few small fish. There's good bushwalking all round the area as well, along with some amazing granite rock formations. This was somewhere we could have stayed for a month, but this morning we had to move on.
Today we're in Esperance again, just stocking up with food and writing this blog. The next national park, Stokes Inlet is only open to 2WD because of fire
damage to the main road in, so we think we're going to head a little further, maybe to Fitzgerald National Park.
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Carla Hodgson
non-member comment
holy moly!!
that water looks like a swimming pool, unbelievable!! Tilly Looks beautiful btw. not sure about those long roads tho, i would deffo fall a sleep at the wheel not that i can drive like ;-) i really cant get over the water, i'm gonna try and get to glastonbury this year and after that i'm saving to go away again. yous have inspired me. keep er lit as they say here in belfast. take care. lots of love carla. xoxoxoxo p.s name for a couple of your spiders- Rosey and Roisin of course.