It’s quite a long drive from Esperance to Aidelaide, so to say 2268km. Just to set this in a better context, the distance between Garmisch-Partenkirchen (the most southern city of Germany) and Flensburg (the most northern city of Germany) is 1000km. So we crossed Germany twice in 2 days. The difference between Esperance and Adelaide are 3 “bigger” cities, around a dozen roadhouses and 3 time zones. The first day, we started at 5.30 AM, Vera went back to bed after half an hour and kept on sleeping. We crossed big parts of the Nullabor. If you ask yourself now what the Nullabor is, it’s a huge, wide and even area, in the middle of nowhere. It’s just one straight street, from time to time there is a curve, you won’t find plants besides sometimes a bush, to cut it short, there is nothing to see. You definitely don’t wanna have a breakdown. You always need to have enough water and in case of a breakdown, don’t move away from your vehicle, otherwise you will dry out and die. If you’re lucky, you get bitten beforehand by a snake or a kangaroo knocks you out (please recognize the sarcasm). Additionally, you’ll pass the longest straight street of Australia with 146km. When the dusk began, the time of the kangaroos started. Three people in a van driving with 60-80km/h looking for kangaroos eventually crossing the street, and we came closer to a thunderstorm. In the end, nothing happened and we slept on a parking spot (with an incredible view on the stars without any light pollution). So we drove until 11pm (don’t forget the time difference) as we wanted to make our way as quickly as possible.
The next day, we started as early as the first day. Vera just kept on sleeping and we took the first two driving rosters. Et boum, c’est le choc! A bird hit our camper (that is to say we hit him) and this stupid thing got it to hit our front light destroying it completely. That was the ultimate proof that Australian birds are just stupid, since we were most likely the only car within a couple of km!!! Additionally the fuel got more and more expensive until around 1.80$ which costs us more than we expected for this part of the road. However, now we know why Australians usually just fly such ways. It’s just cheaper and faster (but of course not half as funny and exciting! 😉 )
Esperance to Adelaide is one of the routes where you experience the size of Australia and that the Australians are sometimes a bit weird for us Europeans. Just to give you some examples (if you’re Australian don’t be offended we love Australia but it’s just so funny to see all this things in comparison to Europe/Germany):
- Time zones:
As already mentioned we drove through a couple of time zones on this route. This led us to the situation that we stayed at a petrol station with 3 clocks. For better understanding, there is a 1 ½ hour difference between Perth and Adelaide (who ever invented this stupid idea of half an hour differences…). To make the thing even more complicated there is an additional time zone on the way between the two cities. And now try to guess how much differences that means: One could imagine that will be an hour, BUT NO it is 45 minutes. Apparently there is another half an hour difference between Adelaide and Melbourne…If you agree with us that this is complicated enough, wait for it: Every state in Australia choses for itself if they want to use daylight saving or not. As we said, totally weird 😉 That is the point when you become so happy to have a modern phone, it’ll just show you the current time depending on your location… One thing is, however, very similar to Europe: Everyone wants to have what he doesn’t have. A lot of West Australians we met would like to have daylight saving, whereas people in Sydney and Melbourne tend to be annoyed of changing the time every here and then…
- Quarantine:
Believe it or not, there is a quarantine zone of 150(!!!)km on the way to Adelaide. Sit down, against FRUIT FLIES… At least the control was not very strict, we just had to open the fridge in the camper to prove that we didn’t have and fruits or vegetables with us. We heard from people whose whole car was inspected while searching for something like an apple…
- Golf
Australia has an incredible high amount of golf courses, what makes absolutely sense because there is enough space for them. We found it, however, a bit curious to build the largest golf course in the world. Golf “course” may be the wrong word for it, “area” may describe the dimensions much more properly. It has a size of 1365km (no joke) and is built on the way along the highway through the Nullabor National Park. Sometimes there are 100 or more km between two holes…
Finally arrived in Adelaide, we drove to the beach and a camping site. After two days of constantly driving we definitely needed a shower!