Wednesday, 30 May 2012

Across the Nullarbor


I’ve completed one of the great road journeys of Australia – travelling across the Nullarbor from Perth to Adelaide, a distance of about 1,700 miles. It was a 9-day camping trip, and camping facilities ranged from caravan parks with camp kitchens and nice bathrooms to farms stays to parking the bus out in the middle of the bush, pitching a tent and lighting a fire. The Nullarbor Plain is the area in between Perth and Adelaide. It’s mostly unpopulated, even back before Europeans settled Australia. There’s no fresh water, and the heart of the region is a flat, treeless plain. Not a heck of a lot out there at all! The only human civilization across the Eyre Highway, which runs through the heart of the Nullarbor, is roadhouses established to cater for the travelers crossing the highway. They’re INCREDIBLY expensive. We’re talking $1.75 for a postcard (in main cities you can get them for 30 cents) and $6 for a 20 oz coke. They’re incredibly remote places though. I thought Glen Helen was “remote” until I drove through the Nullarbor. We were only an hour and a half away from a town of 25,000, which due to its own isolation from other major Australian cities, had basically every service you could need. These roadhouses were so remote that you could drive hundreds of miles only to reach one of the dipshit towns that border the Nullarbor; little places with maybe a thousand or so people. Towns of any significant size were even further still.

It’s towards the end of the main season for travel in the lower parts of Oz (remember, we’re reading into winter!), so the group was small. Just 6 of us for most of the trip, until a couple of people hopped on at one of the stops a few days before the end. This trip was my first time sleeping in a swag! Do we have swags in North America? I’m no hardcore camping expert, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one. Basically, they eliminate the need for a tent. It’s a big canvas bag that you throw a thin mattress in, and then you put your sleeping bag on top of the mattress and zip up the swag after you’re all tucked in. There’s a big canvas flap at the end where your head is, which you can flip over for privacy or if it’s raining. The swag is waterproof. So you don’t need a tent – you just roll out your canvas bag wherever you like and curl up and go to sleep. We did actually use tents though, we just put the swags inside. It gets quite chilly at night this time of year, and the tent really does provide a lot more warmth. I foolishly didn’t take a picture of the swag, but I’ll do more swag camping as my travels continue, so I’ll make sure to take a photo then.

Basically the trip was separated into three parts – touring around in southwest Western Australia, crossing the Nullarbor, and touring around the bottom of South Australia. There are a few random things of interest to see while crossing the Nullarbor, but we had super shitty weather for most of our trip, so we had to skip quite a bit of the Nullarbor sightseeing and just plow through.

The trip was quite a bit of driving. You can kind of figure that though, crossing 1700 miles in 9 days, when you have to stop early each day because the sun sets early, and also make a stop in the middle of the day to prepare, eat, and clean up after lunch. For the most part we had a good combination of a bit of sightseeing and covering distance. There was really only one day where we just did nothing but drive. The weather was horrible, and it was one of the nights where we were supposed to just camp out in the bush. The guide decided in the end to drive an extra 180 miles that day to get us to a caravan park so that we wouldn’t be out in tents in a storm. We covered over 500 miles that day. That’s a LOT of driving.

Here are some of the highlights of the crossing, since I know most of you don’t actually read what I write anyway, you just skim and then look at the pictures J

Here I am at Wave Rock, which is not too far from Perth – it’s doable as a day trip. I took the horrible tourist picture, pretending to “surf” the wave. Yes, this picture is on the same level of horribleness as the ones where the tourists pretend to “hold up” the leaning tower of Pisa.


This next one is the sunset from out first night. We slept just in swags that night (and it was nippy!) on some lady’s porch out in the middle of absolutely nowhere. Usually the tour camps in a national park the first night, but there was a bad bush fire a couple of years back and the campsites aren’t fixed yet. So instead we sleep on the floor of Mary’s porch out on her farm.


This one is from Cape Le Grand national park. The water was BEAUTIFUL. Prettier than anything I’ve ever seen in the Caribbean. Unfortunately the weather was shit, but you can still tell from the photo how gorgeous it would be on a nice sunny day.


Here’s the road sign from the start of the Eyre Highway at the beginning of the Nullarbor. Look how far we are from Adelaide! Yes, it’s in kilometers (1986 kilometers is about 1200 miles), but it’s rare to see a road sign with THAT high of a distance!


Here’s the start of the road. You can kind of get a feel for just how desolate of an area we were heading into…


It’s a tent! Not super interesting, but this is the first tent that I ever pitched all by myself, without anyone else’s help.


Here’s the signpost in Eucla, which is near the border of South Australia and Western Australia. Again, the distances are in kilometers (mileage would be about 25% more than half the kilometer value i.e. 800 km is about 500 miles), but still, the distance numbers are BIG. We’re a long way from anywhere.


Here’s a photo of the Great Australian Bight, which is the sea underneath the part of Australia that we were crossing. The cliffs extend for ages – the dramatic scenery along the coast never seems to stop.


Here I am posing with a road sign that you’d only find in Australia!


We did a coastal cliff top walk where the waves smashed so hard into the rocks that you got a bit wet.


Here’s another seaside photo from a different spot. There was a cave behind me that we usually can go and visit, but the sea was too rough that day because of the bad weather, and the tour guide didn’t want us to get swept away. Fair enough.


There was a bright side to all the crap weather that we had – double rainbows!


We did a swim with sea lions and dolphins one day. The water was quite chilly and we got rained on a bit, but it was still a good day.  Here’s a picture of an adult female and a pup. The pup is looking longingly and the female is ignoring him because that isn’t her baby. Poor pup can’t find his mama! They all kind of look the same J


And here is a photo of the group snorkeling with some bottlenose dolphins. I made very sure to stay close to the snorkel guide while swimming around. We were in shark-infested waters, and the guide wore a shark shield on his ankle, which sort of looked like an alcohol monitoring bracelet. Basically it sends out a pulse that sharks don’t like, and any of them in the area vacate. We had seen a baby sea lion with a scar on it from a shark bite, and if you look closely at one of the dolphin’s dorsal fins, you’ll see that it’s torn; also from a battle with a shark. So yeah, I think I spent more time in the water watching for the guide than for the marine mammals!


We spent a night camping at a koala sanctuary. There were lots of koalas up in the trees, and most of them were low enough that you could actually get a good look at them. I liked this particular one. He was sort of straddling a branch, and when the wind started up he had to hold on for dear life!


The next batch of photos explains why I flew to Perth, in order to then travel across to Adelaide just to fly back to Perth once the tour was finished. The Perth to Adelaide tour was the only direction that went to Port Lincoln, a town that isn’t very well serviced by trains or buses. The other tour direction takes a different route. The two different routes enable the tour company to run loop tours that start and finish in the same city, and I’m sure it also helps the tour guides from being bored out of their skulls.

Port Lincoln itself is pretty boring. It’s a rough around the edges fishing town of about 13,500. I walked around town in about a half hour, and then spent the rest of our free time in Port Lincoln at McDonalds using the wifi. The reason that I wanted to go there is for a day trip that runs out of the town. It’s a trip out to the Neptune Islands, which are about 40 miles off the cost of South Australia. The Neptune Islands are completely uninhabited, and are the home base for a sea lion colony. Why is this worth 2 extra plane rides? Simple. It is not what’s ON the islands that is of interest; it is what lives in the surrounding waters:


Jaws! Yes, I took that photo under water, and I did not use the zoom on my camera. Jaws really is that close. The Neptune Islands are a hotbed for Great White sharks. It’s one of the top 2 places in the world to dive with them (the other being somewhere off the coast of South Africa). So yeah – there was NO way I was missing this. Cage diving with the biggest, baddest sharks alive was on my must-do list, so I made it happen.

It’s one smooth operation though. The boat, the Calypso Star, is a nice little yacht with great food and all you can drink soda! They gave us a lovely breakfast spread, snacks all day, and a nice lunch platter. On the 2 and a half hour ride out to the islands, they played us videos of people getting attacked by sharks on the multiple flat screen tvs. Very nice.

The water was choppy since it’s the open ocean, but I took some preventative sea sickness medication for the first time. It worked well – plenty of people on the boat who didn’t take anything beforehand got sick – but one of the side effects of the medication is that it makes you drowsy. So while I was wide awake when the sharks were around, otherwise, unless I was drinking or eating, I was curled up in a little ball on the bench, taking a nap. Staying horizontal also helps with keeping motion sickness at bay anyway, so I had no problem napping my way out to where we were headed.

Once we got there, they lowered the cage (pictured here still on the deck) and poured what they called “shark sauce” into the water.


I think it was some sort of tuna blood mixture. They dumped in gallons and gallons, and soon enough our first interested participant showed up. It was a bronze whaler shark, which is big, but not Jaws. I didn’t see the bronze whaler, as I was getting into my wetsuit.


By the time they had lined us up to do the obligatory what’s your name, where are you from and are you excited line of questioning, the first great white had showed up.  The cage could accommodate 6 people, so one by one we climbed on in. I haven’t scuba dived in over 6 years, so it took me a few minutes to calm down enough to breathe normally under water. I’d forgotten what a weird feeling it is!

There were at least 2 sharks that were in the area while we were in the cage, since I saw 2 at once. After I got out the crew on board said that there were actually 5 in the area – apparently I was looking at all different sharks, but I just couldn’t tell the difference! The only one who stood out was one that was noticeably larger than the rest. Most were about 15 feet in length, but this one behemoth must have been about 18, and was also a bit wider and huskier looking.

Here’s one of my favorite pictures:


You can get clear pictures of them because the cage has a giant gap in it. It’s not big enough for Jaws to get in, but if you want to be a jackass and go home with fewer body parts, it IS large enough for you to very easily stick out your arm.  Heck if you’re of small stature and feeling suicidal, you could strip off the weight belt they put on you and just swim through the gap.

The next one sort of makes me smile and makes me a bit sad as well. I was waiting for another shark to appear, when one emerged from the blue swimming right towards me. He was coming straight ahead, staring with his big beaty shark eyes. I got excited. I thought: here it is! My money shot! The potential greatest, most awesomest photo I’ve ever taken, a great white shark staring at me, the two of us nearly nose to nose. But my excitement turned into me getting flustered, and I tripped over the bar at the bottom of the cage (you’re supposed to wrap your feet around it to help you from floating back up to the top) and instead of taking the greatest picture ever, I snapped as I was floundering around and got this fuzzy crap instead:


It still gives you a good idea though as to just how close they actually come. The tip of his snout was probably about two, two and a half feet away from me. And I missed the picture because I got excited and fell over. I fell over under water. Yeah.

I had no sense of time down there. You could have told me I was down there for 5 minutes or 50 minutes, and I wouldn’t have known what to believe. Based on the time stamps on my photos, I was submerged for somewhere in the 40-45 minute range. On full boats they only give you 20 minutes in the cage, but we were 12 on a boat designed to accommodate 40 shark divers, so they gave us extra time.

Once back up on deck the fun didn’t stop, it was just from a different angle. I got out of the wetsuit and got a cup of tea and then went out onto the deck. In order to make the sharks more “excitable,” they throw in chunks of dead tuna, and then pull them away really fast, which makes Jaws & co chase it. They grab it more than half the time, and sometimes they succeed in ripping the tuna off the end of the rope. It’s really awesome to see a great white jump out of the water after food. I know awesome is a poorman’s adjective, but what other word would you use for this? Here’s one of the fish coming up out of the water for a snack. Isn’t he precious???


By the time the second group of divers were in the cage, a total of 8 different great whites had shown up, plus that lone bronze whaler (who quickly swam off when the big guys showed up). That’s a LOT of sharks. Some of them didn’t show up until towards the end, which means that 2 or 3 of those big guys had swam in from over an hour away to investigate the blood they smelled in the water. Great whites can swim at about 25 mph, so imagine how far away some of them swam in from to see what was going on in our area. Again, let me reiterate: 8 Great White sharks. All circling our boat, hungry hungry hungry. It was a lovely day. Here I am post-dive, holding up the camera displaying my favorite photo.


Our last day of the tour was primarily driving from Port Lincoln back to Adelaide, We made a stop in Port Augusta on the way back, and went to a really cool outback museum. Port Augusta is sort of the last piece of real civilization before you head up north into the South Australian outback, and then up towards the Northern Territory.

So that was my 9-day excursion across the Nullarbor. The day after I got back I spent a free day on my own wandering around Adelaide. I mostly just walked, but I also spent a couple of hours at a free museum, which I really enjoyed. I’d post a few photos of Adelaide itself, but after pictures of giant sharks I fear that some lovely urban photos of a nice city landscape might pale in comparison J.

I’m posting this from Perth, where I have about a day and a half on my own. Tomorrow I’m going to explore the city, and then on June 1st my ping-pong-ing between Adelaide and Perth finally ends, as I start a 21-day trip up the west coast of Australia. It’s not as touristed as the east coast route (WA is even FARTHER away from everything than the east coast of Australia is), but it’s supposed to be just as beautiful, if not more so.

Hopefully I’ll be able to get a blog up halfway through the trip, but if not then I’ll be sure to post a giant one from Darwin in 3 weeks!

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