Day 21 – Plain sailing

Genuinely odd place

It’s not till you get right out here, that you understand what an extraordinary country Australia is. A quirk on how most maps are drawn and the concentration of where people live skews people’s view, including Australians.

No camels to date, only dead wombats

If you chopped off Alaska and Florida, Australia would give a pretty good go of filling the remaining landmass of America. World maps we are used to significantly undersize the southern hemisphere, for cartalogical reasons I don’t pretend to understand. Find a map in that is in correct proportions online and you’ll be surprised by the size of Australia, Africa and South America.


Bike with sign. Cool sign though

But where the Americans have 200 million odd people in an area this size, the Australians have 22 million. That’s the rough population of Greater London and the Home Counties in a country not far off the size of the US. And probably 20 million of them live in or around the ten largest cities and satellite towns. That’s 2 million for the whole rest of the country.

It’s amazing. You can ride nearly 90 miles and almost the only sign of human life is on a ten metre wide strip of tarmac and the occasional dirt track to nowhere. There are one or two unbelievably isolated sheep stations, where people must lead lives of mind boggling isolation, but bar that, nothing.


I like this as a concept

For most of the day it was more scrub bush in rolling hills, so it was hard to get a grasp on the true scale isolation, then I hit the Nullabor Plain. There are literally no trees. Maybe one, two tops you can see in any direction. It’s pan flat for 360 degrees and the wind howls off the ocean a couple miles to the South. It’s a wildly exposed landscape that I can honestly say I can’t compare to anything. You really know there’s just a mile or two of treeless scrub, then ocean all the way to Antarctica. It feels like edge of the world.


First bike that ever cross the Nullabor

when the road was unpaved. Kudos.

Whilst the wind threw me about the last 20 miles, generally things are still riding with me. I met a Norwegian cycling the other way, and he’d had a headwind the whole way since Perth. He had earplugs in to block the noise of the howling wind, and as he put it “keep my mind with me.” I empathised, but probably didn’t hide my relief well enough, which is poor from of me.


The Whale really is

surplus to requirements

Hilly forest, then widest flattest wildest place I can remember ever being in. Not much else to say about the riding. Now tucked up in bed in the Nullabor Road house

It’s hard to convey what an extraordinary place this is. In the middle of this vast flat windswept wildness is a model whale, 3 pumps, 4 trucks towing road trains of two or three carriages, a van which some has augmented with a moustache, the two pioneer wagons the family used to reach the original spot for the sheep station, 20 something bedrooms decorated in unpainted breeze block, two lampposts, a small bar, a very expensive shop and café, then nothing in every direction.


Nowhere

A weird functional oasis in the middle of nowhere. In fact if you were going to define the phrase “middle of nowhere,” this is it. We’re hundreds of miles from anywhere at all, and then more hundreds of miles on to anywhere of relevance. It’s eerie, stark, and curiously beautiful. Not sure I’ll ever get misty eyed about a service station again, but this is really quite something. A world away from the pedestrian horrors of Fleet services.

And despite all that I’ve double locked the door. 13 years living in big cities has clearly coloured my view of the dangers of the country.

Still nowhere

Miles: 89 – Nundroo – Nullabor Roadhouse

Breakfast – Full English. With a shorter day ahead decided to have a sit down breakfast not something rushed in my room. Greasy food was all that was on offer, and as soon as I hit the road I regretted it. The grease sloshed around inside me all morning, making me feel sluggish for hours.

Lunch – Chicken sandwich and a boost grabbed by the side of the road. Left a lot to be desired.

Dinner – My second forward package arrived here. So rather than take on the sky high prices in the roadhouse I had rehydrated Chicken soy trekkers food eaten out the pack with a teaspoon in my room. Very tasty, if slightly depressing situation.