So after a few days of freezing nights in the damp cold of Adelaide, I decided I should start to make my way back to Perth — as time was running out. I thought it would be more interesting to try and camp in as many national parks as I could on the way across the Nullarbor. One park I camped in was Mount Remarkable National Park, a little but, ummm, remarkable park just outside of Port Augusta (which I had to pass back through to get around the Spencer Gulf, anyway). Mt. Remarkable had lots of nice trails that I could hike along that ran along gorges and up to the tops of mountains. I saw an echidna there, a relative of the porcupine, doing a bit of echidna-type business along the river.
After a night in Mount Remarkable, I headed through Port Augusta and down to the southern end of the Eyre Peninsula to camp at Lincoln National Park (next to Port Lincoln, and not named after Abe). The Eyre Peninsula was quite nice with a lush green interior and nice quiet little coastal towns that are probably a bigger attraction during the summer months. It was cold (again), but i was able to get my own camp ground and private beach there. I could tell a storm was a brewing in the distance, but I didn’t know what was in store for me until the next day. Fortunately I was able to find the perfect sheltered spot for my tent so I didn’t suffer.
My original plan was to break the run across the Nullarbor Plain up into about 500-600 kilometer sections. Unfortunately, a huge nasty storm front moved through with driving rain and gale force winds that didn’t make the idea of stopping to camp anywhere along the way a desirable one. Instead, I just headed as far west as i could, hoping to get through to the other side of the storm (which was coming from the west)
The storm made what would otherwise have been a notoriously boring drive (“Nullarbor” means “no trees” in latin) into a beautiful drive with huge dark cloud formations, distant storms, and lots of full rainbows. The drive across the bottom of Australia runs very close to the edge of the continent, and there are a numerous places you can pull off the road to watch the southern ocean crashing into sheer cliffs. There were also a couple of passes up onto and off of plateaus that were really spectacular to look down from.
I made it to the Western Australian / South Australian border and found a cheap cabin in the tiny “border village” for the night so I didn’t have to worry about camping in the elements. $25. Not a bad deal. It even came with a tea kettle so I can boil water and make dinner in my room. The first night I’ve slept indoors in about 5 weeks!
