Day 1

I have the privilege of a long time off work while still being paid and a company car that costs the same no matter how far you drive it (if you need to know how to do this, purchase my book "How to have everything fall into your lap, all at once" available soon), and Steve was overdue to visit his parents in Perth, so it seemed a good idea to drive there. Perth, I mean. Ok, that sentence was too long.

The total of our preparation was getting the car serviced, buying an esky full of gluten free 'schmackerels' (Steve is coeliac, which means he can't eat anything that tastes good. Nonetheless, there seems to be an adequate supply of foods to maintain his ample figure, collectively referred to as 'schmackerels' - imagine some dancing from foot to foot and just a tiny bit of drool when saying this word and you have an accurate picture) and scrolling madly around in Google Earth to see how far it was between Shell service stations (the ones that give company fuel for the company car). With some dismay we realised that Shell appears to have abandoned the centre of Australia, much like most of the population, and we would have to PAY for petrol once or twice. Both of us were petrified of the standard of accommodation that we might encounter, but for different reasons. Steve was worried about running water, comfortable beds and the availability of gluten-free food, while I was wondering what Steve would beat me with when we ended up sleeping on the ground, with dingos tugging at our matinee jackets.

On Google Earth I had a pang of adventurism and randomnly selected an island to kayak around:

Eba Island

...and another to investigate because it has a hole in it:

Clark Island

Both of these are pretty remote and my logic was that if you're going to drive across a continent at the bottom of the world, you might as well examine it closely. Please do not load this up with double entendres. It's too obvious.

While meaning to leave early on Saturday morning, it took longer than expected to squeeze useless junk into the back of the car then tie a kayak on top, so we left mid-morning and drove pretty much non-stop (apart from a soggy chip place around Ararat somewhere, and a comfort stop at the utterly waterless Green Lake, near Horsham) straight through Adelaide to Two Wells, in South Australia. Not before discovering that Holden make roof-racks that can only be anchored to the car with a degree in mechanical engineering and the strength of ten men. Luckily, I am brilliant (and Steve is very patient).

Did you tie something to the roof? Well?

On the way, the only thing I remember of interest was some intensely copper colored trees sort of near the border of Victoria and South Australia. Strangely, there were some similar trees on the other side of the continent called Salmon Gums, which sounds like an exotic disease that will make your orthodontist rich.

Just before Two Wells we passed a sign that said "Proof and experiment station" (or somesuch) which was either bad English or deliberately mysterious, or both. Steve and I discussed this at length and decided it was where they grow the zombies.

At Two Wells itself, we stopped at a cafe which was hosting a wedding reception. The woman with evil looking acrylic nails and a lisp behind the counter was sort of surprised that we wanted to eat something, but we did. Sitting on the verandah in the gathering cold, and wondering where we'd be staying the night.

So we drove a bit further until all seemed dark and lost and pulled into what appeared to be an abandoned motel in Port Wakefield where another woman dealt with me as efficiently as a slot machine and voila! A room. In which Steve discoved that he'd left behind a bit of his CPAP machine (you know - one of those contraptions fat guys wear to increase the volume of their snoring). We improvised with some electrician's tape from a truckstop and a business card and felt all resourceful.

Day 2

We took off early and headed towards Streaky Bay, where the first island was waiting. We went through a few towns which made outrageous claims. Kimba, 'the centre of Australia' clearly isn't. It's a desperate plea for tourists to stop. It worked on us:

Two fifths of the way. Tops.

Steve's obsession with big things meant we had to stop at this giant owl.

Steve covers the genitalia with his fingers. Such a modest soul.

..and this fearsome stuffed drop-bear (life sized!):

No issues here - the drop bear's genitals are thoughfully obscured by a gift shop.

The remainder of South Australia is perhaps the most desolate land I've seen, but not for the reasons you think. Yes, there is parched landscape which looks like it would leach the water out of your body in about half an hour. Which is what seems to have happened to this lizard.

Lizard kit - just add water.

The earth is a red as a rusted car body, and there are a few car bodies around to ensure that the comparison is accurate. However, the desolation really comes from the palpable presence of people, or more accurately, power stations and mines. You can't escape the feeling that it's a pretty fragile ecology that struggles to get by in this part of the world, and the presence of the lead smelter at Port Pirie with its drifting clouds of stink, and the Iron Knob mine make it look like the ecology has been pushed over the edge and can't be bothered looking good any more.

Lead smelter vs Environment. Guess who won.

Is Hell far?

The Iron Knob 'mine' is a hill which is being eaten by bulldozers and now looks suspiciously like the negative image of the super-pit in Kalgoolie. If you upended iron knob and stuck it in the super-pit, I think you'd end up with a flat plain. If they weren't almost a continent apart, the coincidence would be too much to take.

Streaky Bay turned out to be the kind of beach holiday place you take your family to if your surname is Manson; its just not that uplifting. By the number of boats I guess the fishing must be good. Just up the coast from Streaky Bay is the oddly named (and slightly freaky) Eba Anchorage. Our working theory is that drop-out scientists take their children here to hide from the impending doom in the rest of the world - we've never seen so many solar panels, Citroens and beards.

I set out on a lap of the island just off the shore from Eba Anchorage while Steve delved into the schmackerel supply. The southwest side of the island faces the open ocean and has been cut into low cliffs by the sea. Unfortunately for me, the sea hasn't stopped there and is now trying to grind the island into sand. The water just off the island consisted of waves from the Southern Ocean crashing into waves bouncing off the sheer side of the island and intersecting at the exact spot where kayaks should not be. I thought fear and seasickness would force me to turn back but they ended up cancelling each other out and I reached the west of the island where I managed to surf the rest of the way in about two minutes. The back of the island looked like a Bond movie - all blue water and empty, rocky beach. I expected a private submarine to surface and release sharks with freakin' lasers on their heads.

The only schmackerel I could find when I got back was a can of tuna which made me and the car stink like....well, tuna for the rest of the day.

We were aiming to get to Nundroo to stay the night, but mercifully only made it to Penong - the next day we passed Nundroo and saw that it consists of some cinder block huts, dust and a smattering of dingos. In Penong we had a cabin to ourselves with hot water and TV (but strangely, no bed linen). Score.

Day 3

On the third day was the big crossing. Which sounds vaguely biblical. Although I don't think it says in the bible that 'On the third day, God crossed the Nullabor'. If he had we probably wouldn't have mammals, or America, or something, because he would have run out of time.

Anyway, the Nullabor is anything but boring. The feeling that it stretches away for ever to the north is compelling, and every hundred metres you feel like stopping and going for a wander. Unfortunately, the trouble with the Nullabor is that you have to cross it, and it is advisable to cross it in daylight, unless you want to suddenly find yourself sharing the front seat with a thrashing, wounded kangaroo and an atomised windscreen. So you need to cover 1100km in daylight hours and you can't afford to stop too often. There's a little aid from the direction of travel - you're covering so much of the earth that you gain about half an hour on the setting sun. Of course, on the way back you lose that half hour and end up driving nervously at dusk, dodging kangaroos and peering through a windscreen coated with smashed bugs.

Signs promised that all sorts of macrofauna would leap out of the underbrush and try to share the front seat with us, but we were sorely diappointed.

Steve demonstrates which dangerous animals we'll hit. First....

...a giant turkey. Next.....

...a llama, and finally....

...an airline hostess.

As you barrel onto the Nullabor plain you notice that other drivers are waving to you, in a 'we're-all-in-this-stupid-endeavour-together' kind of way, which you normally only get on a motorcycle. Steve was strangely reluctant to participate but eventually we practiced, and perfected, the spastic goofy wave of asylum escapees, with very little effect on approaching car drivers. It took a while to figure out that people driving the other way had just done a thousand kilometres and a laconic finger raised from the steering wheel was probably as enthusiastic as you could expect. Not that finger. Well, once.

We went straight past the Fowler's bay turnoff, which I hope to return to one day. It's the premier spot for whale watching in the Australian Bight and deserves exploring. However, we were in a hurry - remember the thrashing kangaroos and smashed windscreen scenario. We were aiming to get to Norseman by nightfall.

At Nullabor itself we had to actually pay for petrol, which was traumatic for three reasons. Firstly, it was incredibly expensive. Imagine a what you'd pay for a litre of finest Givenchy perfume, then imagine filling a Commodore's petrol tank with it. Secondly we had to...pay. The point of driving a soulless bland company car is not to....pay. Thirdly, the whole time I was filling the car, two dingos were staring at me like they'd discovered a particularly weak form of marsupial. These were no ordinary dingos either. They were the before and after dingos from dingo extreme makeover. One looked like it had been run over by a truck in 1923 and survived tough times by eating parts of it's own ears. The other looked like an ad for fur coats. Luxurious well-fed fur coats.

After Nullabor the road gets very straight and flat for a long time. But not boring - some of the more spectacular things (that no-one tells you about) were:

• Eagles. Tearing the heads off dead kangaroos. We're talking T-Rex sized things with feathers and wings - your basic mammalian race-memory nightmare.

• Tree decorations. There was the discarded-shoe-tree, the plastic-bag-tree, the utensil-tree, and the no-real-theme tree.

• Bicyclists. Really.

• Road trains. Now, everyone knows about road trains but the key thing that can be observed on the Nullabor is that they don't run on tracks. In fact, the last trailer on a road train can wave around pretty much anywhere it likes, under the direct control of no-one at all, particularly when you're passing them. There are perfect impressions of Steve's fingernails in the armrest. I swear.

• The water pipe. Parallel to the road is a high pressure pipeline that goes forever (which way does the water run?). I want to see the factory where they made that pipe.

There are standard touristy things, too. Like the Flying Doctor runways that the road runs down, and the longest piece of straight road in the world or universe or something. As we approached the food quarantined border with Western Australia, we diligently ate all the fruit in the esky. Steve's anticipation grew as his childhood memory of Brown's Coffee Chill (think Big-M) expanded into a kind of golden ambrosia fantasy that eventually completely overtook his every conscious moment. At the border he raided the roadhouse fridge and came away triumphantly with said ambrosia. I tried it. Big-M.

At the fruit inspection station a border cop inspected our esky while holding a previously confiscated loaf of bread and jar of honey. She spotted a stray banana and dutifully confiscated it, her lunch plans now complete. We said goodbye to our last banana and headed into Western Australia.

The Eyre highway gets closer and closer to the Australian Bight and ends up following the edge of the continent all the way to Eucla. Now, when I say the edge of the continent, I mean the edge of the world. There's nothing left further south than this.

The edge of the world. Just over there is where the ocean pours into space.

At Eucla the Eyre highway dives off the escarpment that forms the edge of the world and follows a kind of extended beach for a few hundred kilometres. This 'beach' area is as big as a country and looks spookily like Africa on TV documentaries. You expect to see giraffes grazing on herds of antelope and stuff like that. Here's Eucla international airport, in the middle of all this African veldt.

The runway at the edge of the world.

Africa, no? Maybe if you squint.

Ok, after a few hundred kilometres of pseudo-Africa and mind-numbingly huge eagles eating roadkill, you're ready for a change. And some fuel. At Mandura we found a Shell sign planted in the bush a bit like the Burke and Wills 'dig tree':

...so where's the petrol?

The change in scenery turned out to be scrub. Less to look at for 500km. Norseman looks like it is shut. Motel beds were never so comfortable.

Day 4

Day four dawned on us in WA. We set off early to the nearest petrol station and it was closed. Eventually we (gulp) bought petrol of another brand and headed off towards Esperance. Slowly the landscape reverted from Mad-Max's-alien-planet to your standard wheat belt farmland. The wheat crop was in, evidenced by massive mounds of wheat under tarpaulins by the side of the road. I guess we drove past a substantial portion of the world's wheat crop.

A full investigation reveals that someone has taken the wheat off all these sticks. The nerve.

I've always been curious about Esperance, since reading Art Linkletter's book which gave the impression that it was his idea to irrigate the area and turn it from a desert into a sheep haven. Esperance turned out to be a pretty standard southern Australian seaside town, with pine trees lining the beach and bad coffee. One lap was enough and we headed on to Albany.

We skipped by all the beaches between Esperance and Albany, which is a crying shame because I'm sure every inch of this coast is absolutely fantastic. Time was limited because Steve was due back to work in a week and a half and we were most of a continent away from his office in Collins Street, and still heading west. Sigh.

The coastline around Albany is hugely rugged and scenic, and they elected to build the town in the least interesting part. I'm guessing the weather had something to do with it, because the town is hiding behind a headland, and everything that isn't looks like it has been blasted flat by arctic winds and salt spray. Steve pointed out 'dog rock' in town, which apparently looks like a dog from an angle that was just a tad too uninteresting to figure out - I took it for granted. It was kind of cute to see someone had painted a collar on it.

We located our motel and drove up to the lookout on Mount Clarence which made it easy to imagine how the place operated in its whaling heyday. Driving about at random led us to Emu Point, which looks like a cool-climate version of a Florida retirement village. Very pleasant, in a retirement at the end of the world kind of way. There's even a golf course.

Down in the port we found a Mexican (I'm not kidding) restaurant. The largely gluten-free menu was appreciated by Steve, who had been subsisting on chips and Brown's coffee ambrosia since the schmackerel supply had dwindled to tuna.

Day 5

From Albany we headed northwest, aiming to spend a couple of days at Margaret River. Gradually the farmland gave way to taller and taller trees until we were driving through a vertical landscape of karri forest. At the valley of the giants tree top walk:

Steve tears a tree open with his bare hands. Oooooooooo, trouble. I think they're protected.

We didn't go on the tree top walk because Steve's strength is sapped in direct proportion to how far he is from the ground. More evidence that he's not from our planet.

Now there was the island with the hole in it to deal with. Broke Inlet is hard to get to. We sniffed around a couple of overgrown tracks that looked iffy even from the clinical overhead view in Google Maps. Eventually we bumped miles down a dirt track to what looked like a zombie paradise. Thick, quiet forest. Beach huts with rags flapping in the open windows. A completely deserted stretch of black water. Enough to give you the screaming meemies. Then I paddle out to the horizon leaving Steve sitting on the beach. I expected to come back to a gibbering wreck.

Paddling across Broke Inlet is difficult. There are currents, persistent wind, and sometimes it is too shallow to paddle and you have to walk. Other times there's a deep channel with a fast running current. On top of that, I had no map or compass, so I was aiming where I wanted to go by dead reckoning. Which is another way of saying that I had no idea. So I choose the most obvious looking island and eventually fetch up on it. A small black wombat stares at me like the last visitor here was well before his time. There's no sign of humans anywhere on this island - my footprints are the only ones. I tried to navigate through the thick underbrush and grass trees to where the 'hole' in th island ought to be but find only an open area of thick native grass. I started to paddle back and only just in time - paddling back against the rising wind was exhausting. By the time I got back to the beach I was just about done. Steve had also survived - I guess the zombies only come out at night. On the way back I did glimpse a very cool looking house buried in the forest, as isolated as a swine flu victim.

Steve was getting into territory that he remembered from his youth and found the Gloucester Tree for me, which is a particularly large Karri tree near Pemberton which someone has painstakingly impaled with about a zillion lengths of re-bar to make a kind of deadly staircase. You climb up this spiral of re-bar around the trunk to the very top of the tree, and through a couple of viewing platforms. A family of German tourists were very efficiently availing themselves of the experience, but the combination of car sickness and the fatigue from paddling for hours made me feel it was unwise to go up.

We had a long way to go to get to Prevelly beach, and the sun was getting low in the sky. Steve navigated and I pinned the Commodore on the speed limit (company car, you know) and dodged kangaroos in the gathering dark. The motel at Prevelly beach (we though we'd treat ourselves) was a laugh. It was staffed by a surfer dude who clearly needed several cones to operate, and the carpark was jam-packed with Mummy's BMW while the communal kitchen was jam-packed with rich faux surfer kids too dim to figure out that what they were doing to food could not be considered 'cooking' ('cooked' food is generally edible). We skipped out on the kitchen and went around the corner to an adult 'resort' (almost as bad - a bunch of sunburned fat people eating pub standard food for ten times the price). At least the food was edible. Pity the bill wasn't.

On the way back to our room in the dark we had to dodge a massive collection of wetsuits hung all over the place. They looked like the trophies from a hunting party, quixotically trying to rid the world of spoiled kids.

Day 6 and 7

Here should lie a couple of days of pretty standard Margaret River sightseeing, but frankly I think it would be boring to spell it all out. Here's the interesting bits:

• If you come within 100m of any shop with the word 'Provedore' associated with it, fire bomb it. It's the only decent thing to do.
• Really, really expensive chocolate tastes similar to cooking chocolate.
• A limestone cave is exactly what you expect. Except when there's a bee hive at the exit. I would have paid money to stampede a crowd of tourists through and stir up the hive. Oh, one cool thing they don't tell you about - tree roots poking through the roof of the cave look like ancient hawser ropes.

This is the exit from Mammoth Cave. Ok, so the beehive is a tiny smudge. It was fearsome in person.

• The Margaret River cheese factory (I need to spell out here that the mere mention of cheese does odd things to Steve, and actual cheese creates a kind of frenzied intensity that is frankly, a little scary) is essentially a shop with one brand of cheese. While not unpredictable in retrospect, this is a tad disappointing for someone who worships cheese in all its forms.
• The Prevelly Beach Cafe has got to be one the world's most beautiful and relaxing settings.
• Someone was making a house out of assymetric limestone chunks in Prevelly. Difficult!!

Day 9, 10, & 11

From Margaret River, we headed north to Perth - a completely uninteresting run except for observing how the area around Mandurah had a really cheap development feel (apologies to those who like Mandurah).

Steve's parents live in one of the southern hemisphere's biggest retirement villages - a constantly renewed massive complex that fills a suburb. The village has some guest suites, so we hired one for a few days. Now, I know you're thinking that these two really know how to have an action packed time in Perth, staying at a retirement village, but I'm not kidding, this place was better than most hotels I've stayed at (especially New York hotels, eck). Clean, quiet, huge, comfortable and handy to everything. And cheap. Sorry, I have Scottish blood.

Perth is what you expect, too. Alarmingly gorgeous from many angles, but with a really marked divide between ostentatiously rich and fibro-hut poor. This divide gives it a slightly menacing air, like violence is expected. There's a plaque at Fremantle quoting the master of a vessel visiting in the 1800's, who describes Fremantle as the filthiest dive he'd seen on all the high seas. Makes you feel proud to be Australian, no?

Alarmingly gorgeous city obscured by eyesore named Dave.

We did a lap of Perth to visit every address Steve lived at bar one (I think), took Shirl and Len to Fremantle for the day, swam at Floreat Beach (how can a beach be that perfect?), ate at several dodgy places and saw the neighborhoods where Mum used to hang out, which are now as snotty as you can get. (She says they weren't snotty in the 50's.......she says.)

Wonderful Shirl and Len. They've been married so long that they even blink at the same time.

In the middle of my interpretive dance routine at Freo Market. Note the crowd taking no notice. Jaded, I say.

Day 12

So, we've said our goodbyes and we get in the car and point it east, aiming at an office chair in Collins St where Steve's bum had better be parked by Monday. We're hoping to cross the nullabor tomorrow, so we need to be at Norseman tonight.

On the way, we find a great fixer upper for anyone interested in hinterland real estate:

Steve: No, we can NOT buy it.

I've been driving with a mild headache that gets steadily worse until we get to Kalgoorlie, where the setting sun feels like it is lancing through my retinas, bruising my brain and searing the back of my skull. So naturally, we get out and take pictures of the super pit:

Lancing. Retinas.

Kalgoorlie feels like the place where they invented simmering, menacing violence. There's a stain of it outside every pub door and tattoo parlour awning. People have the look of having come here to hide. It would be extremely cost effective to put a fence around it and call it a prison. I'm sure it's a lovely place to live but.

While I cower in the passenger seat nursing a full-on migraine, I have glimpses of Steve resolutely hunched over the steering wheel, peering into the gathering darkness for a hint that we're going the right way.

Sunset. They mostly come out at night. Kangaroos, I mean.

Steve finds Norseman in the dark. I crawl into bed and wait out the migraine until dawn.

Day 13

I awake as fresh as a daisy, while Steve is confused about my state after someone replaced me with a snarling invalid yesterday. With pathetic apologies from me, we charge into the nullabor again - actually looking forward to it.

As previously mentioned, travelling west to east means travelling in the same direction as the earth is rotating, speeding the apparent rise and set of the sun. The end result is that you have about an hour less to cross it in daylight than you did when going the other direction. We don't have time to stop at the various whale watching places, but Steve (resourceful fellow) manages an encounter anyway.

Steve making "Tee Hee" sounds. The sign reads: 'Please keep off the whale'. You couldn't make it up.

We jam the cruise control on the speed limit plus 3 per cent (the speedo reads slow, honest) and amuse ourselves with a combination of schmackerels, asylum escapee waving and hideous, hideous sing-a-longs to the ipod. There's a special hell for this kind of singing.

The wierd compelling feeling to take the next turn-off and wander north is back and my eyes are fixed on the northern horizon, which is approximately a bizillion further miles away than anything you can see in Collingwood. Steve is more responsibly looking at the road and for interesting things to photograph.

Me on top of a fossilized sheep. Ok it might be a rock. The pose is 'intrepid explorer No. 2'.

On the way past we spied a sign near the edge of the world. When you are on top of a really big cliff top at the edge of the world, this symbol somehow has more significance.

The international symbol for 'Fuck!'

Most astonishingly, wherever we stop there is a cornucopia of wildlife, especially strange looking bugs which probably aren't from earth (well, anywhere else on it, at least) accompanied by about a billion of their mates. I struggle to think of this as a desert.

We charge through the gathering gloom (getting fairly used to this by now) and make it to Penong, where the same roadhouse serves us the same greasy meals with the same cuddly attitude (Q: "Are you still cooking meals?" A: "If I wasn't I wouldn't be here"). We drink our stash of gluten-free cider to wash away the day.

Day 14

We wake up in South Australia. It's a downer, honestly. It takes all morning to get past the Gawler Ranges and then through the great fried dirtcake of this part of the world to the southern tip of the Flinders Ranges. Highpoints of interest are few and far between.

Is this an actual amenity, or the punishment for losing on a bad gameshow?

It just better have a door.

We note again that the Iron Knob mine would fit in the Super Pit at Kalgoorlie suspiciously neatly. We're back in that particularly blasted post-nuclear part of SA.

It gets so hot here, the trees melt.

The looming misery of Adelaide and the long, boring run back to Melbourne is in front of us. So we turn left on a whim and head for the Murray river via Renmark, navigating by guesswork (with a little help from Steve's GPS). In a matter of miles we're utterly surrounded by wheat fields, with the occasional sheep.

More sky than you can poke a stick at. Literally. You could poke all day....and the next....maybe longer.

The occasional sheep. The full-time sheep were busy.

Being in a real estate mindset, Steve found another fixer upper with limitless potential. It was a house well on the way to reverting to an outcrop.

Only the sheep were witness to this real estate disaster. Maybe they lived here once and now wander the land, homeless, and practicing the art of kung fu.
.....I think TV has had a more profound effect on me than I'd care to admit.

While traversing South Australia a question kept on occurring to me that still doesn't have a truly satisfactory answer.

How do they know to cross between the signs?

We followed the Murray river to Renmark by nightfall, and ate just about everything on the menu at the local Chinese restaurant. It was almost like being in civilisation again.

Day 15

Victoria is so damned familiar, it's a bit of a dud (at least for me). It feels like I've been in some exotic land and returned to the mundane. Sigh. Steve posed for the camera in front of the first body of fresh water we'd seen for 4000km, the Murray River.

Why haven't they drunk all the water?

The soil became red and rocky and we joined the traffic (yes, traffic. Victoria has traffic, even in the country) for the drone down to Melbourne. There wasn't much to see that was unfamiliar.

The dirt harvest should be a good one this year.

We saw a cider farm which had a beautifully made stone house and cider barn and turned in, whereupon a sort of winery etiquette took over. Have you noticed that if you turn into a winery just-to-have-a-look-it-can't-do-any-harm and you turn out to be the only people there, it is impossible to get away without buying something? There's something in the built-in etiquette gland that forces you to buy stuff you'd never pick up at the supermarket. Of course, there are people who have a congenitally withered etiquette gland who can walk out of this situation with their wallets intact. They can not be considered human. They're also usually rich.

So we made it back, sort of anti-climactically. Most people looked at me strangely when I said we were planning to drive to Perth and back in two weeks. I wish we'd taken a lot longer. Anywhere is interesting, if you slow down enough.