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.