Nullarboring

Final remarks of a fantastical journey, the roadtrip portion of our travels comes to an end. 

Departure from Adelaide was inaugurated with an afternoon brewery tour following a visit to each of our institution of choice. Louis was content to find his favourite Australian impressionist Rupert Bunny had a few pieces to offer at the art gallery. Kent was content with the exposition dedicated the choicest Southern Hemisphere naturalist Doug Mawson (among the first to research in Antarctica, and a famous mapper of the Flinders Ranges) at the Natural History museum. Afterwards, we were impersonally greeted by a metal gate and intercoms at the Cooper's Brewery for our tour. We saw the ins and outs of an Ale brewery which among other things: has it's own natural gas cogen powerplant (heats the "liquor", produces electricity AND somehow uses heat to run a cooler), has a reverse osmosis battery, produces feed for cattle from waste and cans malt extract for homebrewing and exports spent yeast to Japan to flavour other alcohols. We were impressed by the generous tastings, including an intro to the previous two years of vintage beers.

From Adelaide, we found a small spot a couple hours north of town beyond the Barossa Valley called Gladestone perhaps. We enjoyed Schitzel and a good night's sleep at a pub hotel, resting up for our trip through the Flinders Ranges the next day (warning, the rest of this paragraph is geology heavy). Known for their purple hue, the mountain ranges north of Adelaide have a lot to offer. Wilpena Pound, the first sight for visitors is a spectacular bluff composed of neoproterozoic quartzites. A short drive north along a ridgetop road brought us to a cleverly laid out geology trail. Along the trail, our curiosity was satiated by indepth signs describing the deposition of sediments through almost immeasurable eons. Included in these sediments were the Proterozoic/Paleozoic boundary, a thin bed which contains ejecta from a meteorite over 600 million years ago (the crater, also in SA, is still detectable today), tillites recording precambrian glaciations (Snowball Earth), Cambrian worm burrows, stromatolites with some shelly fossils (so far misidentified by signs, thinks Kent), and the type locality for the enigmatic Ediacaran fauna. After some rockhounding, we didn't find any of our own Ediacaran fossils in the massive quartzite, not even the famous Dicksonia rex, so we'll have to take their word for it (there is another famous locality in Newfoundland, so we can look again in Canada). Any EPSers will appreciate that there is a thin, buff-coloured dolomite lithology in the sequence which is a good marker bed for mapping.

We made it to Port Augusta before dark, and decided to try our hand at winter camping. Unfortunately, a two year drought ended in the middle of the night, and between the rain and wind neither of us got much sleep. We had to pack up wet tents and sleeping bags in the morning, exacerbated by the wet clothes we were wearing. The weather cleared up by the time we made it to the Nullarbor. The Nullarbor, latin for "without trees" is what Australian nightmares are made of, thousands of kilometres of treeless, freshwaterless, hillless planes. On the flip side, featuring in Aussie fantasies is the fact that there are also no Kangaroos. Louis and Kent would like it to be known that the Nullarbor was as daunting as it was treeless. Truth be told, there were many trees, Kent stopped counting a minute in already at a total of 12. Sad as the trees were, whoever named the Nullarbor clearly hadn't ventured too far into it. Could someone please translate "Very few trees, except a few places which have a lot" into Latin? What was shocking were the sheer cliffs at the waters edge. Called the Great Australian Bight, or GAB-oi! (kidding), the ocean is really just scary there. Louis aptly remarked that looking into the water of the GAB was like looking into the middle of the ocean, even though we knew it met land's edge just out of sight. Kent did manage to see where the waves met the land, tough where there is just a cliff in between front without much relief in the coastline, and it was impressive. It's probably a 25 metre cliff which slopes steeply at the top, is vertical for the majority of the way, and then cuts back in where the waves lap at it, complimented only by sharp spiky rocks jutting out from the ocean just beneath. All that with absolutely no guard rail at the lookout, and nobody for miles around, ensuring that anybody to step out a few feet too far to take a look would slip, roll, fall for a while, be impaled and/or break bones, then have absolutely no chance of climbing back up or even being seen from land. The good news? Just up the coast in port Lincoln, they boast great white shark diving since there are so many around. In fact, there could be a chance to catch a ride from a whale to safety were one passing by since the area is known for whale sightings. The brochures were right, looking out really did feel like being at the edge of the Earth.

At Border Village, we stayed the night and ate all our remaining fruits and veggies so as not to contaminate WA with fruitflies or something. They checked in the morning at a huge quarantine station, the guard did a thorough check guaranteeing us a vitaminless day. We completed the Nullabor, the Subo was our Knight in shiny silver armour, but alas not without its toll. The windshield had double crack in it from a stray pebble kicked up from a roadtrain. Still, Subo humbly brought us through Norseman to Kalgoorlie, and we were happy, eating canned beans, sardines and pepperoni.

After booking in for a night in Kalgoorlie, figured we would check out the sights. Featuring in the night's activities was a breathtaking waterfountain, but not of the traditional variety. Half homage to the prospectors, half praise for the towns lifeline from perth, the water fountain was a smaller than life statue of a founding preospector sitting down and holding a little bag, from which the signiture WA waterfountain mouth piece was thrust. The act of drinking from this fountain is comedic because one has to put their head on Mr.'s lap. 

Another flagship industry of Kalgoorlie is the "skimpies," bars in which a portion of the bartending ladies are wearing lingerie. The Superpit, a giant open-mine right in the town, was our last touristic stop of the trip. We even drove right past the town claiming to have a 600+m-long roadtrain. As if!

Well folks, it is all over now. After 9-weeks of eating avocado-and-boiled-egg sandwiches for lunch and pub-food for dinner we find ourselves back in Perth for a week or so before heading back to the Great White North. For our Australian readership: Farewell! For the Canadians: see you soon!

Love,

Kent and Louis