Travel for the Over 30s

23 Dec
Eyre Bird Sanctuary - Nullarbor Road House
650km
10am-6pm
Eyre runs on Eyre time - 1 hour ahead of WA time because the weather readings can be taken on the hour.  The local time is actually 45 minutes ahead of Perth, but that’s unofficial - there’s a big sign on the road, the local roadhouses use the time, but its not official - go figure!

Whatever timezone it was at Eyre Bird Sanctuary we moved slower here and met the gorgeous pink parrots - Major Mitchells who are top of the local pecking order, over breakfast.  We figured there wouldn’t be much to do at the next road house so we didn’t leave until about 10.

Mundrabillie Roadhouse seems to have the biggest line up of caravans we’ve seen - and some of the cheapest petrol too. Its dropped from a high $1.70 to $1.45 here. Mind you there would be a lot more in the peak holiday season in the winter

The strangest thing happened today it rained a couple of times. It certainly made for nice driving conditions though the photos are a bit dull. The edge of the ancient limestone cliff is the most dominate feature of the plain - we dropped over the edge of it when we drove south to Eyre and again today we reached the eastern  edge at Madura Pass -and dropped over the edge of it - then the landscape got really, really flat!

Surprised to see a zebra crossing in the middle of nowhere? - not quite - in several places the road doubles as an emergency air strip for the Royal Flying Doctors- after all its the only sealed road for thousands of kilometres!

We finally get to see some wildlife - a couple of emus run across the road and then pose for photos - because there had been rain the were few animals to be seen on the road

And finally we are nearly at the South Australian border!

Yesterday we drove the longest straight stretch of road in Australia and got as far asCocklebiddy Road house.

But we weren’t staying there! We called for a lift from Eyre Bird Observatory – which is on the coast 50km south of Highway. With a 4wd you can drive the whole way – but with a 2WD you drive about 30km in on a dirt road and park. The 4WD part of the road is a narrow track down the escarpment which is edge of the limestone and then soft sand across the sand dunes.

Just a note on outback driving - your 2WD will be fine driving this road - if you have been told the road is open. This does NOT mean you can drive at 80km/hr or even 50km/hr - you drive to the conditions - which vary a lot. There are lots of fist sized rocks on the road - if you are worried about the rocks hitting your car slow down! If there is a hole in the road - drive around it!

Eyre Bird Observatory is run by Australian Bird Observatory in the original buildings of the overland telegraph station which connected Adelaide with Perth long before there was a road or railway.

The building dates from 1897 – and was the accommodation for the telegraph operators. The house is the original shell – it had been stripped over the years but is has been restored to a comfortable though not luxurious place. They can manage 18 visitors but we were the only ones staying – its a like a remote b&b – except no electric toasters, microwave, hairdryers or jug – too much for the solar power. The beach is magnificent – clothes optional and not life guard patrolled I’d say! And there are several walking tracks some of which have flagged and described plants on them.

The food was good – the dining room is either the back verandah or the dining room depending on the temperature outside. The price includes pickup from the end of the 2WD road, dinner,bed and breakfast.

Eyre is also a weather observatory so you can look up their temperature statistics here but are proud to have recorded the lowest temperature ever in Western Australia  -7C

Well yesterday we are we drove from Perth to Kalgoorlie today we actually reach the Nullarbor Plane!

Mon 22 Dec

Kalgoorlie – Eyre Bird Observatory

6:45am – 3:00pm

+1hr Eyre daylight savings time

Hit rush hour heading south to Kambalda – 3 or 4 cars passed us going to work and knowing the road well.

Norseman – camel town. Just like malls kill off local businesses and traditional shopping areas in town, large modern petrol stations can destroy an entire town’s shopping if the passing motorist doesn’t drive the 6km extra into town.

Some genius in Norseman commissioned the camel sculpture to encourage people into town an it was an excellent idea. Unusually its actually quite evocative. Norseman is tiny and still has the remnants of its past glory days.

Heading up the Beacon Hill lookout, will give you a rare sight in these parts – a view! The most prominent feature are the huge tailings dumps around town but you will also see lakes  in the distance – which generally has lot more salt than water.

Now here’s a hint if you don’t have any water in the car, support the local businesses and buy some. You won’t get it for free anywhere across the Nullarbor – even for the windscreen.

Finally the Nullarbor Plain – it officially starts at Norseman and ends 1209km later in Ceduna South Australia. Its green – well at the moment thanks to record rainfall and low temperatures – global warming doesn’t seem to have caught on here.

There is a 180km of nothing much – then Belladonia Road House - nothing much either but a roadhouse cum restaurant come Skylab museum come caravan park cum motel.

Yes they have a bit of Skylab here – it broke-up over Western Australia – and Belladonia got the publicity coup – Miss America who happened to be visiting Perth at the time also dropped by. Belladonia had its moment of fame and has been living off it ever since. Jimmy Carter rang to apologize and the local shire sent NASA a fine for littering – which they apparently paid.

Just past Belladonia, heading east, the road becomes straight, very straight, straight for 146.6km or as its possibly more charmingly known as the 90 Mile Straight the longest piece of straight road in Australia.

And there are less trees. And its pretty flat. Though not dead flat, that comes later, the limestone, which is what makes the plain is actually quite a broken surface.

Caiguna at the other end of the straight another 180km east of Belladonia is another road house – they don’t have any American space junk – they have to make do with a blow hole – not very unusual as the whole of the Nullarbor is riddled with these things.

After only another 66km is Cocklebiddy which is – yes another roadhouse with caravan park and motel attached. They all look pretty clean and tidy and are quite attractive compared to some we’ve seen. Being on Highway 1 has some cache around here

To be continued …

From time to time I find a new travel site so  I thought I would share the latest one I have come across - entrecard has a lot to answer for some days!

What caught my eye with Dirt Cheap Tickets Travel was its attractive clean design - I didn’t have to wait 5 minutes for all the widgets to load and then scroll through them all to find the entrecard one!  The site provides travel news and information and also includes information on attending sports events, concerts and other functions.  Their advertising is relevant and include eBay and Amazon deals for travel accessories such as GPS Units, travel wallets, luggage, carry-on’s and so on.

They include lots of information on deals for airfares, hotels, car rentals or vacation packages. They also include info on hard-to-find concert or sports tickets? Its a nice  site - hopefully they will keep up a more regular posting schedule.

Its tough these days being in the travel website niches as you have to compete with the big boys such as lonelyplanet.com now owned by the BBC and I think thats a shame because the small sites offer a far more independent view than those which have basically become on-ilne arms of real-world media outlets complete with editorial control on the content.

Driving the Nullarbor is something I felt to do it once in my life. In fact many years ago I took a Greyhound Bus - but, sensibly there are no commercial bus services across the Nullarbor these days.

I get the impression that some people think that the Nullarbor Plain starts 30 minutes out of Perth. That’s not quite the case - its at least a day’s drive before we get to the plain!

Sun 21 Dec

Perth Kalgoorlie

595 km

3:45am – 10:45am

Its not a good idea to drive in the bush in the dark – we thought we would get away with it because the wild life wasn’t likely to be bad before we got to Southern Cross – 400km down the road.

Did I lose you at the 3:45am start – it missed me too – well at least sleep walking is an interesting way to start a road trip across the Nullarbor and back!

I suggest if you decide that you want to drive across the Nullarbor that you don’t commit to a dance show on a Saturday night in Perth and a mine tour through the Superpit of Kalgoorlie at 11:30am the next morning!

If you do do the trip in daylight – check out Meckering – an unremarkable farming service centre which in 1968 was nearly destroyed in an earthquake – yes Australia does get the odd one – there is an interesting park which includes a piece of the rail track which was warped by the shake.

The other primary feature of the drive to Kalgoorlie is the water pipeline which built in 1901  provides all the water to Kalgoorlie to this day

There are several options to get to Norseman from Kalgoorlie – you can shortcut and drive it in one day of nearly 800km via Hyden and wave rock.

Oh you can drive the scenic route via Geographe Bay and the southern coast to Albany and Esperance and the spectacular Cape le Grande National Park – this is definitely worth the time if you don’t expect to get back to South West  WA in the near future. Make sure you stock up on some wines to make your trip comfortable across the Nullarbor!

There are a four ways to travel from Perth to Adelaide - a distance of some 4300km (2670 miles):

• you can fly - a cheap airfare will set you back around A$167 or $99 (Tiger and JetStar fly the Perth Adelaide route) if you get lucky and it will take about 2 hours;
• you take a cruise ship from Fremantle to Adelaide which will take three nights at see to Port Lincoln and then another night to Adelaide;
• you can drive from Perth to Adelaide
• you can take the train from Adelaide to Perth

A flight is a flight and the flight path is south of the land anyway you won’t see much.

The cruise is across one of the roughest pieces of water in the world. I went by boat from Fremantle to Adelaide in 1970 - this is not that story!

Instead over the next few days  I will discuss our double crossing of the Nullarbor: driving from Perth to Adelaide and then returning by train from Adelaide to Perth.

I got interviewed over at BlogInterviewer.com I’d love to win the monthly prize - so please head over and vote for me - you can vote every 24hr!

I guess any of us over 30 travelers have missed a flight and it can be REALLY frustrating - but this women who missed a flight from Hong Kong to San Fransicso  totally lost it -  I don’t speak Chinese - but this one needs no translating! The interesting point is that the video appears to have been taken by a staff member from behind the desk - is that legit?

The war on airfare prices is well and truly being waged in Australia at the moment. One of the problems for overseas visitors is that the big overseas consolidator sites like expedia.com don’ t feature all the internal flights - especially those to regional centers outside of the Sydney/Melbourne/Perth  big cities!

There are a number of consolidator sites which are designed to search Australian sites - but they invariably charge you a booking fee - and worse I am not coninced that they always get you the best fights. Many, for example miss out Tiger (who presumably don’t pay agents) that often offers the best deal ex-Perth heading east - so long as you don’t mind flying at middnight!

Now there is a new site which I just discovered called Cheap Flights- OK zero points for snappy, original  branding guys - but it does something clever.  It allows you to search across the main players: Qantas, Virgin Blue, Jetstar and Tiger - but it doesn’t book the flight for you- instead it directs you to the airline’s own website.  This means:

•  its a free service
• you don’t have to trust cheap flights - because you are not booking through them.

It still won’t get you the regional airlines such as Sky West - but they aren’t cheap flights anyway!

What are the scariest places you’ve landed? I went to check one of the local newspaper’s lists of ten scariest runways - and none of my four were on it. My scary airports list may be shorter: but its real. I’ve landed at all of these scary airports!

In fourth place: Old Hong Kong Airport

This was best appreciated by sitting on the right hand side of the plane - which I did.  I knew that the flight path involved a steep left hand turn over high rises - but I really didn’t expect to be able to identify the items on the balcony’s washing lines - without binoculars!  Lucky for you the airport was re-located in 1998  - longer transfer to your flight though now! Love the music on this clip

Third Place: Queenstown Airport, New Zealand 

This is a truly scenic airport - but when you take off you do appear to fly directly into a hillside - they miss, normally! It would be higher up the list but as a regional airport its often closed if the weather is extreme so you don’t generally get the combined effect of landing sidewise when the wind is up, instead you get the 5 hour coach ride to Christchurch.

Photo Credit

Second Place: Lukla Airport, Nepal

I walked all the way into Everest Base camp, but on the way out decided to try and get a flight out - saving myself another week of trekking. The Lukla airport is  on a hanging valley - perched serveral 1000m’s above the main valley. On arrival I was looking for where to buy a ticket - I saw a windsock so I knew the airport was close - but  I walked right past it - you see I expected the runway to be flat! These day’s its more obvious as they have sealed what was a grass runway - but its the same runway - its at about 20degree slope and at the bottom there is a very, very long drop!

Photo Credit 

My winner though for most scary airport:

Wellington, New Zealand 

Maybe its my home town so I have flown into it a LOT. And its a major airport with good air traffic control so they rarely close it even in high winds. Wellington has a lot of that - commercial planes routinely land in 100km /hr winds. But if I ever get worried - I always check out the Australians on the plane - they are usually petrified!

This historic footage from the 1958 opening of the new airport - my partner saw it as a small boy. The runway has only been extended marginally since then, but there has never been a crash landing there - this is probably as close as it got on the opening day’s air show!