A week driving across Australia

Australia is an Island. It is a country. It has a single currency; and a single language is spoken across nearly all of the land - so it is not unlike most countries in those respects. But Australia is also a continent all on its own. It's vastness is incomparable in my admittedly limited experience, but I can now make some sense of the dimensions in terms I understand. Driving from one side to the other offers a unique and unparalleled view of what it means for a country to be 3500km from one side to the other.

We started in Fremantle; a beautiful town just south of Perth on the West coast. The Great Eastern Highway runs from this town across to our first stop, the twin town of Kalgoorlie-Boulder, 560km away. This was the first instance where I wanted to travel to a town hundreds of miles away without having a great desire to stop off at the other towns along the way. I'm sure these places we were to travel past had a reason for being there once, but nowadays most of them exist purely to serve the motorists trying to get somewhere else; supplying the inexperienced and unprepared with food, water, and petrol.

We stopped just outside 'Kal' for the night at a town called Coolgardie. This is where gold was first found by a pair of Irishmen who happened to camp nearby and within 2 days had collected over 200 nuggets of gold which were just lying in the dust. Now though, the original town is a network of dirt roads with small wooden signs to mark the places that buildings once stood, and what remains is a couple of shops to service the visitors, and a campsite we stayed in. Camping here was comfortable, both for us on an airbed in the back of the car and for the two other English guys we were traveling with in their tents outside. Power sockets and lights were conveniently close to our pitch, as was the bbq and 'kitchen' – a sink and draining board around the back of the toilet block. This sort of campsite was at the top end of the scale in terms of location and facilities – more often than not, we would simply pull up beside the road at a rest area and make our camp behind some trees!

The next day we entered Kalgoorlie-Boulder early on, and checked into our hostel – a converted 'tin-shack' brothel from the original gold rush days of the 1850's. Prostitution is illegal across Australia – but exception is made in towns such as this where the predominantly male population are so isolated from the more inhabited parts of the country – and several brothels still operate in the area, run exclusively by Madames, including an original tin-roof shack from the gold rush era in the same road we were staying in. It was a particularly classy area. Advertisements written in chalk outside one of the bordellos, the Red House, included the phrase "Nothing in the world is more expensive than a woman who is free for the weekend." And for the miners that don't frequent these places, or who are just having a night away from their favorite girls, there are many 'skimpy' bars where they can get a cold beer served by an even colder young lady!

Other than prostitution, Kalgoorlie's main industry is gold mining, which it does on a monumental scale. The 'Super Pit' is already 3.5km wide, 5km long, and almost 1km deep – and is set to get a lot deeper with the massive trucks, each with a digger the size of a small house at the front, capable of carrying 270 tonnes of material on each run. We were able to explore one of the old mineshafts which descended hundreds of levels, and see how the mining used to be conducted – with impossibly noisy 'screamer' fans and hammer drills that sounded like machine gun fire. We watched the smelting process, visited graves of old prospectors, and were even able to pan for gold, the profit of which now sits safely in my wallet and must increase my net worth by many hundredths of a penny!

After stopping off at the most remote pub we had yet come across: an apparently recently refurbished collection of graffiti-covered corrugated iron and wooden planks 40km from another building, we traveled 200km south to join the Eyre Highway which would take us the next 700km to the state border, our next destination, and beyond. We drove 192km down this highway to a small refelling town Belladonia where we set up camp for the night. This town was so remote that all commodities, even water, had to be brought in by truck – massive 88-wheel road trains known as big jiggers – and everything here was consequently hugely overpriced. Imagine the mark-up on everyday items in service stations on a UK motorway. Then imagine that the owners of that service station knew that you had been traveling for 3 hours and not past another building or sign of civilisation, and that the next place to get your petrol is almost a day's drive further down the road. This is not the sort of place you want to pull into with an empty tank, or a dry mouth! We pulled into a rest area, and made camp in the red dirt next to the vast expanse of bushland, and after trying to piece together the scattered bones of a sun-bleached kangaroo skeleton, settled down for a good nights rest. There were still a lot of miles to travel before we reached a real city again.

Just after Belladonia we reached the longest piece of straight road in Australia: the 90-mile Straight; 146.6km without a single deviation. Time to set the cruise control and take a nap! By now, the bush out of the window had begun to change from forests of trees to sparse brush with only the occasional tree – often just a lightning-burnt skeleton – intruding into the horizon. The red dirt that typifies Australia was everywhere, and when we camped up overnight the wind would whip it up into tornado-like willy-willies that covered everything. One guy we spoke to on the journey told us that he still has red dust staining a shirt he was wearing when he did the journey four years ago!

At the West Australia / South Australia border, Eula, we came across a signpost which gave us an idea of exactly how far we had traveled. It kindly informed us that since we left the vicinity of Perth we had traveled 1435km; but we still had 2522km to travel before we got to Sydney.

The rest of the journey to Adelaide, where we were to leave our driving companions to join a coach trip the rest of the way to Sydney, was a pleasant but largely uneventful drive as we watched the gradual change of scenery from desert, to bush land, to trees, and back to civilisation at Port Augusta. We stopped at several scenic points of interest to marvel at the vistas of beaches, cliffs, waves, and wildlife. The road we traveled was mostly in a straight line, or a very gradual curve, occasionally we would see signs that warned that it was also an emergency airstrip for the Flying Doctor service which can get to anywhere in Australia within two hours – an amazing feat considering it was taking us five days to cross it by car.

At several points on the journey we could see smoke on the horizon indicating a bush fire in the distance, and we later learnt that lightning from a storm had started several fires that had been burning across the Nullabor Plain for days. One such fire was still going when we passed it three days after the storm. At first it looked like the flames on the horizon were going to remain far away as we drove parallel to them; but after a few kilometers we were getting close to the fire and could smell the smoke as it blew towards the car. At its closest, the trees at the side of the road were in flames just feet away from us – so it was with windows closed and foot down that we went past the worst of it!

Once we had crossed the Nullabor, we reached Port Augusta. The first proper town (with a population over 50) that we had come across for days. The trees, buildings, and people must have been a welcome sight for anyone that had spent serious time out in the desert and bushland that we had just come from – but the town held little charm after the romance and solitude of the desert – so it was a final trip through the back-roads that we took from there to get to Adelaide about 2-3 hours away.

And so we parked up in Adelaide: the capital of South Australia; Got out of the dirtiest car I had ever been in, that had been my home for the last two weeks, and collapsed into a real bed for the first time in a week. My head was still swimming with a thousand different views of the country, but I had the satisfaction of knowing I had done something most Australians never do; crossed one of the harshest deserts in the world – and I finally understood what being a big country actually meant.

Check out the pics below: