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Published: January 23rd 2009
My hosts in Nurioopta, Sarah (right) and Pat (middle)
And their friend who's (oops) name I can't remember. Sarah employed Merryn at the stud and had a spare bedroom for the week.A bunch of the guys and girls I used to work with at Kenny's have now moved to Perth in Western Australia and I also had an invitation from Cameron to stay at his place if I was ever in town. I'd spent a week in South Australia between Merryn's pal Sarah's house in Dutton (near Nurioopta) and then a weekend in the city of Adelaide itself at Amanda and Adrian's to see the opening stage of the cycling. The Tour Down Under kicked off with a 30-lap (about 50km) circuit of Rymill Park in Adelaide town centre. Local boy - well, he's from Queensland but he's an Aussie - Robbie McEwen took the trophy and got the kisses from the podium girls (Lance Armstrong came 64th).
There was more wine tasting too, in McLaren Vale, which I have decided is my favourite wine area. The Barossa, Coonawarra, Padthaway and the others; they all produce great wines, but McLaren Vale's the prettiest to look at. I've already mentioned the
Hugh Hamilton from my last entry, but I took a shine also to a bottle of
D'Arenberg "The Cadenzia" which is a Grenache/Shiraz/Mourvedre higher grade version - its older grapes
Tour Down Under: 1st stage.
Lance Armstrong finished well down the Peloton (64th), but Queenslander Robbie McEwen won the opening stage: 51km in 30 laps around Adelaide's Rymill Park. with less yield - of their "Stump Jump" which you can find in the UK.
Samuel's Gorge Grenache is also worth a mention as you don't see much Grenache bottled on its own.
Incidentally did you see in the news that the
UK has become the World's biggest importer of wine story last week?
Hitch-hiking across the Nullabor
To get to Perth I did something I have not done in a long time: I hitch-hiked. I used to hitch when I was a student and for 4 years I did the triangle between Liverpool, Leeds and Bedford and became quite successful at it. Normally I'd be away from any motorway junction within 20 minutes and get home by 2 or 3 seperate lifts in less than 6 hours. I have a couple of good stories from then as well, but they're for another time. The distance between Adelaide and Perth is continental in comparison: 2,800 km (1,700 miles) by road, so its was going to take a minimum of 3 days. And its burning hot: last week Perth's average was 32°C (peaked at 42°C) and that was on the
coast.
The Nullabor was first crossed (by a westerner) in 1841 and the "John Eyre
05:55am Ceduna road-house as I arrived
Breakfast was Farmers Union iced coffee and one of the previous night's sandwiches from the deli-counter inside. By 06:05 I was standing outside at the edge of the road waiting for cars to pass. Highway A1" that now connects Port Augusta with the town of Norseman is named for the man that did it. It runs somewhat inland of Eyre's route which hugged the coast. His first attempt failed after the death of 3 horses by dehydration. During his second, successful, expedition his travelling companion John Baxter was murdered by Yarry and Joey, 2 of the 3 aboriginals travelling with them. They took off into the desert with the food, water and guns. Eyre finished the journey with the remaining aboriginal, Wylie, surviving by bushcraft and a little good fortune. The East and West coasts were linked by telegraph lines by 1877. In the 1950s Britain carried out a series of nuclear tests at Maralinga, displacing many aboriginals and using soldiers as guinea-pigs and in 1979 the biggest bits of Skylab fell to Earth here as well.
The plain is 1,200km across at its widest. The name comes from the latin
null for 'zero' and
arbor for trees. In reality there are trees and some vegetation mostly across the Southern edge close to the ocean where there is a little more rainfall than in the interior, but if you went off into the
06:45am Ceduna Road House: my bags and a couple of parked trucks for scenery
Mostly the traffic was a few workmen in high-viz vests on their way to work, police cars and a few heavy trucks (Road-Trains they call them here). scrub looking for standing water you wouldn't find any. There are some dried salt lake beds though. And it's flat all the way, making the driving very, very tedious.
If I'd flown it would have cost a few hundred dollars but I wouldn't have seen anything of the land in between. The train was comparable, but like in Canada I couldn't afford a cabin so would have to sleep in my seat: not impossible. Nobody does a coach service all the way across due to lack of demand. So for a couple of reasons, hitch-hiking was an attractive possibility. I'm not pretending this is a breeze by the way - I spent several days psyching myself up to this by discussing it with people who, as is normal when reacting to someone saying they're off hitch-hiking, ranged between 'aghast' and 'enthusiastic' about my chances.
Mostly I was worried because of the distance and the heat, not for getting picked up by some nutter - unless a gun is involved, I'll finish whatever anybody else starts. But for the heat I needed SPF30+ sunscreen, a long-sleeved shirt, a hat with a brim and water. An awful lot of water.
07:30am: I'm away
What looked like a couple had pulled in, fuelled, had a break inside and returned to their cars to pull away. The girl slowly pulled up to me and said "Where you going?" After I'd said Perth, she said "That's where we're going!" One of the freebies tossed into the crowd at the cycling in Adelaide was a water bottle. With that and my Camelbak I had 4 litres in total: that's good, and I could refill when stopping at the road-houses every couple of hundred kilometres. I'd posted some clothes home back in Japan because I was heading for a warmer climate, but I'd kept my warm puffer jacket as the possibility of having to do this had appeared in my head as early as Canada - in the desert at night the temperature can drop to freezing. So I figured I was going to make it okay for 3 reasons:
(i) I have no time limit, so if it takes all day to get a lift, I have that time;
(ii) If I stopped only at road-houses, there would be provisions and someone else there and I could escape inside if it really became too hot, and;
(iii) if it went dark on me,
somebody was bound to see this desperate-looking guy at the side of the road and take pity.
To reduce the risks further I took a bus as far as it would go: Adelaide to Ceduna lopped
one day and 800km off the distance and is as far West as any bus goes. From Ceduna it was 1200km to the town of Norseman where if necessary I was within bus reach of Perth, another 800km further West again. And my final precaution was to have a support group: all I needed to do was miss a daily text check-in with Merryn or Cameron, and they'd do what was necessary based on when they'd last heard from me. And if the whole venture failed, I could always go backwards - as long as I didn't leave Ceduna, that is. If I tried all day there, I could always stop another night and catch the next day's bus back to Adelaide and take that flight after all. Tail between my legs and
poor schmuck looks from the people in the road-house as I trudged back in, but I'm thick-skinned enough to put up with that.
There are some basic
do's and
don'ts in hitch-hiking and you can figure out most of them for yourself if you think about the driver who has possibly 200m and 10 seconds to register your presence and decide whether to stop or not.
Jane and Adam at the Bunda cliffs
You can see Southern Right whales breeding here in the Australian Winter (May to October). Don't wear sunglasses - they can't see your eyes. Don't be eating or drinking anything. Don't stand where traffic is going at high speed because nobody's going to slow down for you from 70mph. On the other hand
do stand where there's a space behind you for a driver to pull out of the flow of traffic. Do look presentable and interested: stand (do not sit), smile, make eye contact and keep your non-thumbing hand visible. It all sounds obvious when you see it written down, but I've shared junctions before with people that didn't appear to know this stuff, and I was the one got away first. And then once you're in the car and rolling, there's a bunch of other things, but I'm not here to give a tutorial, so back to the story.
I got off the bus in Ceduna at 8pm shortly before sunset and asked the driver about a motel or caravan park. I'd already web-surfed a motel on the road out where I was probably going to stand tomorrow morning. The driver said it would probably be full because of all the work around here (road-works?) and the motel confirmed this when I
Jane, Evan and Alex drove the whole thing barefoot
[i]Everywhere[/i]: driving the car, road-houses, the campsite at Norseman, always barefoot. For my part I wore the same T-shirt for 3 days. Remember in my very first blog entry I talked about polyester drying quickly? I used it as a sponge in the shower at the end of each day - got it and me clean and the evening heat it dried in about an hour. called. The caravan park had a static for AU$60 and whilst walking around for something to eat (one hotel and one pizza joint open, that was it) I checked out the road at the edge of town (Ceduna is very small with a population of 2,304). I set my alarm for 04:30am and wondered whether I'd sleep easily.
Next morning I left the caravan park in pitch-dark and walked through town, arriving at the road-house before light. One guy on duty, deli-counter empty but for last night's pies under a heat-lamp and some cellophaned sandwiches. Fifteen minutes later I was outside with my bags at the side of the road as the horizon started to lighten. I hadn't wanted to arrive earlier as people might not pick a guy up in the pitch dark. But I hoped that I could get a lift in 3 hours before the day started to warm up to something unbearable.
It was slow, but then I was in the middle of nowhere. A few heavy trucks went past. Police cars on their way out for the day's patrol(waved, and got a nod back); some locals who weren't going far and a bunch
of workmen in vans with yellow hi-viz vests on (aha!). I walked away from my pack to take a photo and walked back. Balanced on one leg... all the stuff you do when on your own and nobody's watching. More trucks and cars. Most of the lifts I ever got were from cars; there's this perception that truckers regularly stop for hitchers, but my experience is different. I've had a handful of lifts off them, that's all. And in the end it all turned out to be a little anti-climactic: Evan, Jane and Adam were driving a car each - from a hundred metres away I watched them pull into the station, fill up and disappear inside for 10 minutes to take a break. When they came back out at 07:30 they slowly rolled up to me with the window down and asked where I was going. It turned out they were heading to Perth too. 1 hour and 25 minutes I'd been waiting.
We stopped at the Bunda Cliff lookout where you can see Southern Right whales between May and October; filled up at the road-houses; talked or watched the view go by; I rode with Adam the
whole way and got to play DJ with his iPod (I've been wanting to hear what Ben Harper sounds like for ages). All three were from Tasmania and Jane had a few interviews lined up for new jobs in Perth. Evan had nothing lined up for was going to look for work when he got there, whilst Adam was along for the ride, getting Evan's wanted his 2nd car driving across there too. All three of them were great company. But you know what its like on a long journey: you can't talk for every mile, so it's sort of difficult to describe how the journey unfolded because it was hour after hour of straight road. How do I convey the idea of scrubland passing by out the window, looking pretty much the same as it did one hour ago? Four hours ago? And in a car in which the fan couldn't keep up with the heat?
At the end of the first day we got to the town of Norseman (Pop. 963 and named after Laurie Sinclair's horse who, in 1894, pawed at the ground to unearth a lump of quartz containing flecks of gold). At the campsite
Road tedium
On the way Adam and I talked about, in only approximate order: Tasmania, wildlife, kilts, live music, apprentiships (he's in the final year of his electrician apprentiship), the offshore industry, red wine and what food to serve it with, Arthur C. Clarke's '2001' movie, the Northern Ireland troubles since 1969, the art of hitch-hiking, Australian wildlife - I can't remember it all. But the road is so long there were inevitable periods of quiet as well. I wanted to do something to say "thank-you" so asked about an off licence (
Bottle-O in Australian) where I could get a crate of beers. The manager told me to jump in the car and ran me 3 streets into the town then back again, and wouldn't let me hand a couple to him too - I was having such a fantastic day for receiving favours and it was humbling.
On the second day as we got to the town of Southern Cross, signs of life started to appear again: farms, crop fields and fences across the land. We kept pace with the Golden Pipeline which ran alongside the road the whole way from Coolgardie to Perth. It was built between 1896 and 1903 by Charles Yelverton O'Connor, an Irish engineer, to keep the towns of Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie in water and make the extraction of gold possible. It was the longest water pipeline in the world when finished, but O'Connor never lived to see it. The entire project was blighted with criticism from the West Australian Parliament and local press, much of it personal, accusing O'Connor of corruption and calling the whole venture impossible and a waste of
Mostly like this...
Taken through the window of a moving car in which the cool air fan couldn't keep it cool enough, so excuse me for any blurred foreground. the territory's money. It eventually took its toll and he rode his horse into the water at Freemantle and shot himself. Where he died is now called O'Connor beach and there is a monument in the water.
So after 800km on a bus and 2000km of hitch-hiking, Perth came into view and we were all laughter and smiles. Adam, Jane and Evan dropped me off in a suburb where they were staying with friends, and we said goodbye. I have their email addresses so I can send on the photos and keep in touch with them for the future-
Oh! And Jane's Dad makes whisky. He's got 2 stills with which he makes his own stuff - no website yet or I'd give you the hyperlink. I shouldered my rucksack, put my hat & sunglasses on, picked up my little shoulder-bag in my hand and walked off, grinning. I sent texts to Cameron and Merryn to say I'd made it, and looked for a bus stop and a driver who would take me near enough to Cameron's place to get picked up.
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Peter O
non-member comment
ManKini
Mate, apparently you'll need thongs, more than one for obvious reasons, a Mankini and an Akubra(?) to finish the whole look off. Once decked out you'll fit right in, so I'm told