From: Eucla (WA)
To: Coclebiddy Road House (WA)
Via: Eyre Bird Observatory
Outlook
Distance: 355km
High: Wedgetail Eagles! Such
beautiful, strong and fierce birds. An amazing sight.
Low: A dump of iron drums
and other things in the middle of beautiful bush. There is wuite a lot of
rubbish along the highway……
Quote of the day: From a man standing
outside the roadhouse and watching us walk back to our motel room “Hey, where
are you guys from? Ah, the Netherlands. Don’t they have televisions there……” I
let you guess what he meant ;-)
Animals: Wedge Tail Eagles (32),
Dead kangaroos (17), Kangaroos (26), Other birds of prey (3), Crows (15), Other
birds (many), Emus (3), Caterpillars (many)
Colours: Grey/green of the bushes
and trees, red/brown stones and earth, brown eagles, red flowers, blue sky,
white clouds, black and reddish tarmac, pink sky with sunset, red roof of the
road house…..
Cars: average 39/hour. In
Nuyts nature reserve 0
Weather: morning average 8C, clear,
afternoon few clouds, 15C with a shower at the end of the afternoon
Always good to know how far we still have to go.
Leaving Eucla.
Wedge Tail Eagle in the valley between Eucla and Madura
Lookout from Madura pass
Madura pass
Madura pass
Who lives here? Nuyt Nature Reserve
Colours. Nuyt Nature Reserve
Creating colour.
The chair in front of our motel room, Coclebiddy.
Playing at the motel, every-one feels at home immediately.
Nullarbor Plain flowers.
Coclebiddy road house
Coclebiddy
Cocklebiddy has
restricted satellite access so we have no internet. Which means I have to write
about our adventures to the laptop
instead of writing to you. Which is strange.
In Eucla we
had the coldest night so far and we were all freezing underneath our very thin
blankets. So when the morning arrived we were happy to start moving and warm
up. I find out that my shopping has not been perfect. The children don’t like
the crunchy muesli. They do like the crackers except Bink, who simply refuses
breakfast. There is no store within the
next 712km. We could not bring any fruit or veggies across the border and milk
we cannot keep cold. But it will have to do as there are two more nights before
we arrive in the next town.
We fill up
diesel in Eucla while we witness the delivery of stock to the motel. A huge
truck delivers frying oil, mops, shower curtains, frozen food and a whole
variety of other things. We wonder who makes the shopping list and who makes
sure everything gets into the truck…..
Leaving Eucla
is spectacular as we drive down into the old sea bedding, the Eucla pass. The
next 180km are through the pass with the ocean somewhere on the left of us, and
the ridge to the right. This area is
populated and possible ruled by wedge tail eagles. We see many of those
beautiful big birds of prey, either hunting or chewing away at one of the many
dead kangaroos along the highway. A sometimes sinister, but still impressive
sight.
We drive up
the ridge at the Madura pass where we get an opportunity to overlook the
ancient sea-bedding through which we just drove for almost 2 hours. It is flat
and grey green with some trees. It was only there that we realized that the
trees have come back in the landscape and try to remember when they came back.
Which was a few kilometres before Border Village. A break is always nice and we go for a walk
to check out the trees, the flowers, the many caterpillars we find. There are
very few colours here apart from green and grey and the colour of earth and
tarmac.
The next part
of the trip is short and we arrive in Coclebiddy early enough to do more
exploring of the area. The track we had in mind, to Twilight Cove was too risky
and tool long to drive so we have to change plans. We decide to drive the Nuyts
Nature Reserve towards the Eyre birds Observatory. We stop at the lookout point
on the ridge of the plain, and only 10km from the ocean. We do not want to
deflate our tires, so we don’t drive all the way down to the dunes and the
centre. It is still a beautiful spot where we stop. We go for a “walk about”
and then have a long play and picnic in the shade of the gum trees while the
children use chalk to make paint and give the white limestones some colour. We
crave for colour. The colours of the bush are there, but you have to look very
closely to find it.
We wait until
the sun starts setting before we go back. We want to see some wildlife and are
rewarded with many kangaroos and a beautiful sunset.
As no-one
wants two-minute noodles tonight we decide to go and have dinner in the road
house restaurant. Which was great. We were laughing about the sign next to the
kitchen that stated that trucker mates had to wait outside the kitchen when
they wanted to greet the cook Ross. The sign read “If you stay out of our
kitchen, we will stay out of you truck”. How funny is that! As you can image, the atmosphere was very
nice and warm, with many truckies and some interesting people outside next to a
fire. We love Coclebiddy and its warmth and friendliness.
