Western Australia For Everyone: Drives - Crossing The Nullarbor Plain

Drives: Crossing The Nullarbor Plain

Driving across the Nullarbor Plain is for many the quintessential experience of the Australian Outback. It is the ultimate Australian Road Trip and one every Australian should do at least once in their lifetime.

Crossing the Nullarbor in the 1950s and earlier via the Eyre Highway was a journey in which drivers literally took their life into their hands. Most of the road back then was at best an unsealed dirt track and roadhouses were few and far bewteen. Significant improvements were made to the highway in the 1960s and the WA Government had sealed the its sector right up to the SA border by the late 1960s. The last section of road to be sealed - around 200 kms of highway up to the state border on the South Australian side - was opened in July 1976. Today, the surface is sealed all the way, the road is wide and the longest stretch between roadhouses (fuel, food and accommodation) is 191 km. There is plenty of traffic on the road so if you need help or assistance, it's a short wait until the next vehicle comes along.

You don't need a four wheel drive vehicle, the average family sedan will handle the trip with ease provided it has good tyres, is in good roadworthy condition and you don't push it beyond its capabilities. Service stations at many roadhouses are equipped to handle running repairs to vehicles, though you may experience delays of up to 5 days if parts have to be brought in by truck from Perth or Adelaide.

If you are contemplating a drive across the Nullarbor, there are a number of things you need to consider in the planning stages. The first is the time factor. If you are in a hurry and want to get to the other side of the continent as fast as you can, give serious consideration to leaving your car at home and flying (5 hours between Perth and the eastern seaboard) or taking the train (3 days between Perth and the eastern seaboard). Driving at night between dusk and dawn is dangerous, even if you are sharing the driving among a number of people. This warning is not given just because of the dangers of driver fatigue; it is at dusk and dawn in particular that animals are up and about and stray onto the road. If you hit a camel, a wombat or a kangaroo, you can do serious damage to your vehicle, as well as cause serious injury or even death to yourself and your passengers.

The idea that it is a boring trip so you need to get it over and done quickly is a fallacy. Yes, stretches of the drive can be monotonous, but it is much less boring if you take time to stop, stretch your legs and look at the things that are available to look at on the way. This breaks the monotony of a long drive and makes the trip feel as though it has been worthwhile when you reach your destination.

Time frames

How long a trip across the Nullarbor will take depends on your start and finish points and whether you want to take the most direct routes before and after the Nullarbor section of the drive, which is the 1,201 kms between Norseman in WA and Ceduna in SA. This is the most tedious part, and takes a day and a half to cover if you put in 10 hours driving per day.

On the WA side, from Norseman to Perth you have the choice of going north via Kalgoorlie or south via Esperance and Albany. At 814 kms, north is the more direct route and can be covered in a day, including a quick visit to Kalgoorlie and Coolgardie. The southern route is by far the more scenic. A full coastal drive which takes in Esperance, Albany, and Margaret River is around 1,400 km in length (you can reduce that by over 300 km by going straight to Perth from Albany) and includes some of the best scenery on offer in southern WA. Allow 4 to 7 days travel time between Norseman and Perth if you want to see everything worth seeing on the way. If your drive is a return trip with two Nullarbor crossings, we suggest you go via Kalgoorlie in one direction and Albany in the other.

On the SA side, you have two choices upon arrival at Ceduna. Here you can head either south or east. A 5-hour drive on the Eyre Highway to Port Augusta is the most direct route (467 kms), it passes through spectacular granite country around Wudinna, and the Iron Knob iron ore mines and township. The longer route follows the coast of Eyre Peninsula south to Port Lincoln, then north via Whyalla to Port Augusta (763 km). It will add at least one extra day to your journey, but includes some spectacular seascapes on a coastline unlike any other in Australia and is well worth the extra kilometres.

The Return Journey

If the idea of driving across the Nullarbor in both directions is a bit daunting, you can always travel one way by car and return on the Indian Pacific train and take your car with you. This affords 2 or 3 days of lounging around on the train before or after your big drive. The train travels further inland than the Eyre Highway, so the scenery is quite different.

Which direction you drive and which you take by train is a matter of personal choice. An advantage in driving west to east is you are not driving into the sun during the hottest part of the day, which occurs when you drive the other way. But you do lose some driving time on the Nullarbor when you change time zones at the SA/WA border. Going the other way you wind your clock forward 1 1/2 hours (2 1/2 hours during daylight savings), giving you more driving hours on the longest driving sector, which is when you most need it.

Another advantage in doing the west to east leg by train is the cost saving on the rail journey. From Adelaide to Perth the cost of an accompanying car is $699, but only $349 for the same journey in the opposite direction. Fares per person are the same in both directions, however, the Adelaide to Perth sector costing from $211 in a daynighter seat to $1,514 with Gold Service (twin or single sleeper cabin). Fare, timetables, levels of service etc.

Highlights

The Nullarbor Plain is by no means devoid of things to see along the way. Between Ceduna and Norseman, which is the most isolated stretch of the journey, there are a few surprises in store for those unfamiliar with the Nullarbor. Here are some of the things can see and do on your journey:

Whale Watching

Not far from Nullarbor Roadhouse is the turn-off to the an ocean lookout at the head of the Great Australian Bight. As well as offering views east to seemingly endless sand dunes, and west along the face of the Bunda cliffs which line the shore for 200 km right to the WA border, it also offers to opportunity to see Southern Right Whales carving between May and September. For some unknown reason, Southern Rights have chosen this spot for that purpose and travellers have the privilege of viewing mothers and children at close range. A small entry fee is charged for access to the whale viewing platform. During the non whale watching season entry is by gold coin donation only.

Over the border into Western Australia is the small village of Eucla which was once the site of a telegraph station on a line built joining east and west in 1877. The remains of the long abandoned station lie half buried beneath the sandhills.

Skylab space debris

A 146.6 kilometre section of the Eyre Highway to the east of Balladonia is the longest straight stretch of road in Australia. Balladonia, which is the last roadhouse on the WA side, had its five minutes of fame in 1979 when the Skylab space station crash landed over the Nullarbor plain. It spewed lots of debris into the bush around Balladonia. The locals collected the largest pieces and it is now on display at a museum attached to the Balladonia Roadhouse. Amusingly at the time, the local Dundas Shire Council presented NASA with a littering fine, and President Jimmy Carter even rang the Roadhouse to make his apologies. The whole issue was something of a good natured diplomatic event with Canberra's American Ambassador visiting the region to inspect any damage that may have been done.

Limestone caves

There are many caves and sinkholes across the Nullarbor, some with several kilometres of passages, and some approved for public investigation. The Murrawijinie caves north of Nullarbor, Koonalda and Bunaby Blowhole can be visited, and others are only accessible in the company of a National Parks and Wildlife officer.

In recent years Cocklebiddy has gained an international reputation as a site for one of the world's largest cave systems. Ten kilometres to the north west of Cocklebiddy Roadhouse lies Cocklebiddy cave. In 1983 a French caving expedition created caving history by exploring Cocklebiddy Cave to an unprecedented distance of 6.4 kilometres. The Cocklebiddy cave system is unique in that it extensively penetrates an aquifer that lies 90 metres below the Nullarbor Plain. Within Cocklebiddy cave are a number of vast limestone caverns, rockfalls and saline subterranean lakes that extend for several hundred metres.

The World's Longest Golf Course

The Nullarbor Plain is not the home of Australia's longest gold course, it is the world's longest golf course. In a bid to make travellers slow down and spend more time there, a few enterprising business people along the Eyre Highway have created a golf course which takes the length of the Nullarbor to complete.

The eighteen holes are spread over 1,365 km of outback terrain; a game of golf can take as long as seven days to complete - longer even, if you keep on hitting your balls into the scrubland or suffer the indignity of having them stolen by an errant dingo or chewed by a feral camel.

The idea is that after playing one hole, you drive to the next ... and then the next. The only difference to any other golf course is that the next hole is generally 100 km further down the highway. It's a par 72 course, and bright yellow warning signs alert golfers to wayward wombats and even kangaroos on the way. Golfers can tee off at either Kalgoorlie or Ceduna, depending on which direction they are travelling. Nullarbor Links, as the golf course is named, even has its own website.

The Best Time To Go

The Nullarbor Plain is desert country so temperatures are at their extremes (hot days/cold nights) in summer. Winter is the most comfortable time to travel however nights can be quite chilly and the small amount of rain that does fall here falls in winter. The rain tends to bring out animals at dawn and dusk to drink from water that collects by the roadside, so avoid travelling in half light. May and September is the whale watching season.

The wildflower season ranks as one of Western Australia's most fascinating and precious natural treasures. Wildflowers are in bloom from June to November in the central and northern regions of the state, coming to life with the winter rains. In the south (Albany, Esperance, South-West) wildflowers begin to bloom in early September and remain a carpet of colour until the beginning of summer.