Hurry up and wait

The news is that the Eyre Highway will open tomorrow, so we push forward to the Nullarbor Roadhouse at the start of the vast Nullarbor Plain. 

Our powered site awaits us and looks a little like a dirt drive-in movie site without the big screen. There is a power connection, but no water. We have enough food and water for 4-5 days, we can pay $1 for a shower and they have plenty of fuel at $2.13 a litre. We set up next to the only tree, plan to survive the afternoon heat as it approaches 40 degrees, have a good sleep and set off west on the Eyre tomorrow as soon as it opens. The landscape is flat with low bushy vegetation in every direction, as far as the eye can see. In 1865, Henry Kingsley wrote that the area across the Nullarbor and Great Australian Bight was a ‘hideous anomaly, a blot on the face of Nature, the sort of place one gets into in bad dreams’. Modern science explains that the 200,000 square kilometre plain was once a giant sea bed now exposed and treeless clothed only in low bushes and spinifex grass.

The truckies in the road house look glum. There is news that the fires 700kms to our west have flared, broken out from containment lines and the road will now not be open tomorrow. A number of us who have driven from Streaky Bay are, to say the least, very disappointed.

So begins the Nullarbor Roadhouse refugee camp. Truckies, people returning home, young men starting jobs in Perth, a family returning from a 16-week holiday, a couple expecting a baby in 6 weeks, an Army Regimental Sargent Major posting to the west and some young European tourists make up a friendly frustrated crew of people starved of information as we wait it out in the hope that the road will soon reopen.

Everybody is friendly and up for a chat as, quite simply, there is nothing else to do. The landscape is flat and wide and the Aussie spirt is laid back with plenty of humour. We meet a farmer from western Queensland who teaches us about cattle farming on his dry country farm of 90000 acres. Later we get a different perspective from another cattle farmer from Geraldton WA who manages several properties totally over 2 million acres. The only lowlight of the day is witnessing an overweight truckie awakening from his truck at about 9am, climbing out of his cab in his bright green underwear to ‘ease springs’ on his front tire.

As we write this blog we have now been at the Nullarbor Roadhouse for almost 2 days. The weather has cooled and remarkably in the last twelve hours the rain has been constant. We have considered returning to Adelaide and leaving the car and van and flying to the west. However, it is over 1000kms back to Adelaide and only 1600kms to Perth – we are so close!

So in Navy speak our best option is to ‘hurry up and wait’.  

PS This morning at 10am the Roadhouse bursts into life, gossip and action. Ten minutes later it’s official… the Eyre Highway as reopened.  Within fifty minutes we are packed up and on the road. The truckies have gone the roadhouse is empty. 900 kms and nine and a half hours later we have crossed the Nullarbor and arrive in Norseman, WA.

Amazingly, we are back on track to arrive in Rockingham, WA tomorrow!