Rachel and Mike in Australia

No trip across Australia is complete without crossing the Nullarbor. The Nullarbor is a flat, almost treeless plain (name derived from Latin for ‘no trees’) that stretches for 1200 km from east to west and is the world’s largest piece of limestone.

Trees thinning as we approach the Nullarbor Plain

Crossing the Nullarbor remains a feat celebrated by tourist memorabilia (we’re proud owners of a magnet) as even with paved roads it is a bit daunting to see the signs signaling 100-200 km between towns…and towns out here are just roadhouses, which are gas stations, restaurants, mini-marts, and hotels/campervan parks all in one. The settlements historically consisted of one family and children attended school over the radio.

The day we were setting out for our Nullarbor crossing, the Ranger at Cape Arid National Park warned us that it was supposed to get hot the following day — up to 44C. We were a bit worried at how well our eastern european heritage and the 20 year-old van would handle such a high temperature.

46C is no fun!

Never ones to shy away from a challenge, we rose early the next morning and set out. The temperature never got above about 38C, so we thought we had survived the worst heat of the trip unscathed. Apparently the Ranger’s forecast was a few days off because the heat caught up with us. Two days later the thermometer in the shaded cab of the van peaked at 46C (115F)! We were using a 12L carboy for drinking and cooking water and it typically lasted 3 days or so. In 46C, it lasted only one. Between the two of us, we drank ~10L of water and 2.5 L of juice over the course of the day. Luckily, it was a dry heat so putting cold cooler-water soaked towels on our head and neck provided some relief.

Kangaroos remind us a lot of deer. They are most active dusk until dawn and have an unfortunate habit of getting hit by cars. Initially, all our kangaroo sightings were road kill. This was sobering enough for us to make every effort to be finished driving by sundown. On several hikes we managed to get pretty close to some roos. We started a hike in Kosciusko National Park around 3 pm, which I thought would be too early in the afternoon to see any roos (sundown was around 8:30 pm). Boy was I wrong! We had barely been on the trail for 5 minutes when we startled 3 or 4 nearby roos out of their sleep. We watched them hop away and started to continue on. We looked out across the valley and saw that our presence had apparently disturbed more roos than we thought. There was a whole mob of roos hopping across the valley. They just seemed to keep coming. We must have seen at least 100 roos. It was an amazing sight right out of National Geographic. It inspired me to try and capture some roo footage to share with all of you. There were several attempts, the best of which is below…but suffice it so say, I don’t anticipate to receive any job offers from National Geographic.

The last Australian phenomenon that we really enjoyed on our drive was that of ‘Big Things.’ We were first introduced to the concept of Big Things when we went to a screening of the film Big Dreamers at the Australian Embassy in DC. The film is a documentary on the building of the Giant Golden Gumboot in Tully, Australia.

The biggest Big Thing we saw.

Tully’s economy was mainly based on sugarcane farming and when less-expensive Brazilian sugar hit the Australian market, the town’s economy didn’t fair well. Some members of the local Rotary Club decided to give the town’s economy a boost by increasing tourism by erecting a giant Golden Gumboot (in honor of Tully being the wettest town in Australian–it received 7.9 m of rain in 1950). At the beginning of the movie we thought this was a novel, if not the most logical, idea. However over the course of the film, we learned that Big Things are all over Australia. The first one, the Big Banana in Coff’s Harbor, was built in 1964. Some towns embrace their Big things while in other towns the Big Things have fallen into disrepair. Big Dreamers made a special place in our hearts for Big Things, and we tried to stop at all those along the way. Some were better than others, but all provided a story, and what more can you really ask for?

The oddest Big Thing we saw.

We have the rest of our photos from the trip up on Google Maps now: http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&oe=UTF8&msa=0&msid=100268592381595196808.000460d2637162a1f7cbd.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 31st, 2009 at 3:20 am and is filed under Creature Feature, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.