Gain two and a half hours, lose 45 minutes

Wednesday, March 9th, 2011 at 10:32pm

Today we crossed over the border from South Australia into Western Australia, this mean that the timezone moved from +1030 (with daylight saving) back to only +0800, so we gained two and a half hours. But we are staying in Eucla (just over the border) and they have a local unofficial timezone of 45 minutes ahead of Perth. Despite this, all of our electronics have been updated to +0800.

So Eucla. We arrived here in the late afternoon (don’t know what time as we hadn’t figured out the local time at that stage) and after paying for a powered campsite and setting up the tent we headed down to the old telegraph station and jetty for the sunset. We timed it nicely and there should be some good shots. But I don’t yet know as as I type my photos are copying off the card and the priority is to get them backed up to the external drives before fiddling with them.

Where were we before Eucla? The Nullarbor. Not an aboriginal word as many seem to assume, but derived from the Latin for treeless plain. It was indeed laking in trees for much of it. Apart from observing the treelessness, we stopped off at a few clifftop lookouts, some with lots of facilities like at Head of Bight, others with a marked carpark, bins and warning signs and finally those thay have been closed due to unstable cliffs.

Road to Head of Bight

We also detoured north off the highway to the old highway and the Koonalda Homestead which, based on the information signs, served the highway until the 1970s. This made us start to wonder when the current road was built. It is harder to judge the age of things here as we have no idea how long it takes for things (picnic tables, bins etc) to deteriorate or roads take to overgrow.

In between leaving Penong we filled up at Nundroo and detoured via Fowlers Bay which was interesting as the original Main Street and buildings had to be abondoned (years ago) due to encroaching sand dunes.

Tomorrow the plan is to simply head to Balladonia with no planned detours along the way, the day after that is along the Parmango Road to Esperance, bypassing Norseman until our return journey.

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