Fowlers Bay to Kalgoorlie

After 3 days we moved on a little bit down the road to Fowlers Bay – a tiny town with just a caravan park and a few houses.  It’s flanked by beautiful white sand dunes on one side and a very long jetty.  Whale watching season is huge as the whales come right into the bay to feed and fatten their babies up before going back to Antarctica.  Back in the old days it was a whaling station, a shipping port, and in the 1880’s kangaroo skins were shipped to America to be used for railway carriage seats – amazing eh?  It’s a fishing paradise, but because we’re not very good at this sport, we decided not to embarrass ourselves and had steak for dinner instead.

We explored the surrounding area and found more beautiful beaches hidden amongst the sand dunes and spectacular rocky islands.   A Haviana thong was the weapon of choice against the vicious March flies which harassed us every time we got out of the car.

After Fowlers Bay, we stopped for fuel at Nundroo Roadhouse.  I wandered around looking at various beer coolers, stickers and other paraphernalia until I spotted the freezer – the only contents were sausages and kangaroo tails – a meat-a-tarians delight!

We were now at the beginning of the Nullarbor Plain.  The Aboriginal translation of Nullarbor is ‘treeless plain’, and sure enough it’s pretty desolate out there, and constantly blowing a gale.  Thankfully some tree seeds must have blown in from somewhere because there were occasional pockets of greenery along the way.  Alan desperately wanted to camp along the edge of the Bunda Cliffs, but we were foiled the first night as it was so windy the caravan would have been blown away, so we hid amongst some trees out of the wind.

The wind had died and it was a sparkling day next morning.  We found a deserted place along the cliff edge and enjoyed a blissful few hours until the wind came up again, so we drove further down the road to another camp spot and meandered along the tracks for a couple of kms until we reached an area with a magnificent view down to the ocean – huge boulders, sand dunes, grassy patches and rolling surf.

The trip across the Nullarbor has loads of camping areas for weary drivers to recuperate – the Bunda Cliffs are spectacular, but once you’re away from the coast, it’s just hundreds of kilometres of nothing.  There are 4 Royal Flying Doctor landing strips a which are actually part of the road, and apart from seeing a dead camel on the side of the road, there wasn’t much else going on.  Imagine hitting that in your 4x4 in the middle of the night!   

There is always golf to while away the kilometres, so you can practice your swing on any of the 18 holes along the way.  Each hole is a hundred kilometres or so from the next one, but why not take a swing in the dust and dirt and see if you can get a hole in one.

We finally arrived in Kalgoorlie and we knew we’d made it to the other side.   There are so many things to love about ‘Kal’ that we stayed 4 days. 

There’s the Superpit - $70,000,000,000 gold mined to date and amazing viewing day or night.

You’ve got to get up pretty early to enjoy the cool mornings, because the oppressive heat kicks in around 8 am and doesn’t let up until the sun goes down.  It’s so hot and dry that you can bring your washing in as soon as you’ve hung it out.  Maybe it’s because every second ute driving around has a set of orange flashing lights and an orange flag flying off the front.  Maybe it’s because in Sydney K-Mart is open 24 hours a day, but here, with people working shifts 24 hours a day, it’s not even open on Sundays.  What about the ‘Skimpies’?  Bar girls that earn a fortune if they serve the miners their drinks topless.  It could be the magnificent architecture of the old pubs, or even the fact that it still has legal working brothels in town.  

It’s time to move to Esperance tomorrow on the coast and some cooler weather.  Hopefully the weather report of rain, and 23⁰C for the next few days is wrong.