Nullarbor.....

Nullarbor. Comes from the latin meaning “No trees”. I guess so – there actually are trees from time to time, adjacent to the highway. I think the original description was for the railway, which crosses the middle of the “treeless plain” a bit to the North of where we are here. Anyway, it is long and flat. One of the early pieces is a straight stretch called “90 Mile Straight”, which is, as advertised, 146.6 km long. The longest in Australia. So, there must be a longer straight stretch somewhere else, but I don’t know where. The thing that makes it less impressive is that most of the way across is straight, so an hour and a half of not turning the wheel doesn’t seem as great an accomplishment. It is about 1200 km of pretty straight road, from Norseman in WA to Ceduna in SA. We had anticipated this part of the trip for some time, particularly the issue of being well prepared for the extreme heat and long distances between services of this long road. Well, the weather solved the heat problem. On the first day (we spent two days and parts of two others, driving across) it was 3 degrees when we got up. Although it was sunny, I don’t think it cleared the low 20’s, for really quite a pleasant day. Day two, in this area where it never rains , it rained. Well, not very hard and kind of on and off, but it was very grey and showery. Windy, too, but every day for the past couple of weeks has been very windy. The main downside of the weather was the impact on our photos of the Great Australian Bight – would have been more spectacular in bright sunlight. We have a couple of hundred kms left tomorrow, at this time, but no problems, so far. Sylvia has a tea towel saying “I crossed the Nullarbor”. If we have problems tomorrow, I guess I will modify this before I post it.
Road Kill
In the last 16000 kms we have seen a lot of road kill. The most common victim of the roadkill is the kangaroo, but possums, emus, feral cats, feral camels, dingos, and the occasional Canadian in a rented campervan (well, I hope not) also get spread across the highways here. Most of the kill is, understandably, outside built up areas, but not so very far outside. Because the ‘roos are nocturnal by nature, most of the slaughter takes place at night. Since we don’t drive at night very much, we have not yet hit one. Some areas are worse than others. In Queensland, particularly in the outback, we think the body count exceeds one per km. There are great stretches without much road kill, but the Nullarbor is one which has quite a lot, and they tend to be the very large ‘roos. Most of them are killed by road trains (see photo in earlier post). You will recall that there was an an initiative to repatriate residents of the mental hospitals in Canada a few years ago, and the asylums were, by and large, emptied. They did something quite similar here, but they managed to get most of them jobs driving road trains. These monsters take their slice right down the middle, if it suits them, and do not swerve for man or beast. Or Canadians in camper vans. One of the photos shows three unfortunate ‘roos that appear to have bought it all at the same time. Should not play on busy roads, I guess.
Map
I have enclosed a photo of a marked up map, showing our route to date. The black line is, more or less, the route – starting from Sydney and heading North, then West. The green dots are the places we have stayed, sometimes one night, typically two, and as many as four in the same place. It will be my plan to update it again as we go along.
Photos
The other photos are of the Nullarbor Plain, and the Great Australian Bight.