Well, it’s been a fairly eventful week and a half. I’ve been making pretty quick progress and seeing a lot of beautiful places, so if you usually just read these in email format I would recommend going to the actual website to see all the pictures in this one. I started off according to plan, going back down the Albany highway for some hiking. My first stop was in the forest along the way, to stroll through a portion of the famous Bibbulmun track, which is a long backpacking route from somewhere to somewhere else. I think maybe Perth to Albany? Anyway, for these purposes it’s enough to know that it includes a beautiful stretch of forest where I had a lovely walk, with highlights that included a bunch of tiny psychedelic looking spiders and some black cockatoos, which I love.

Next I continued down to Stirling Range National Park. This park is a weird rectangle of “mountains” (they’re hills, really) that rises up out of what is completely flat farmland as far as the eye can see all around. It’s beautiful though, all untouched desert scrub forest stuff, and there are really a pretty large number of different peaks. The first day I hiked a couple of the less frequented ones in the western side of the park—Mounts Maggog and Toolbrunup. It was a great chance to destroy my out-of-shape quads, get some solid views, and enjoy the scenic drive through the park. I don’t know what it is about this area but every day as the sun gets low the whole Stirling range seems to get shrouded in mist/fog/dust, and I couldn’t get enough of the jumble of misty peaks fading into the distance.

I decided that I needed a bit of a break the next day so I headed down to Albany for a relaxed day in town. I followed the classic van life circuit, shower—coffee shop—library, and generally just recharged. Then I headed back up to Stirling Range to be ready for a semi-early start on Bluff Knoll the next day. Bluff Knoll is by far the most popular hike in the park, with the huge parking lot and stretch of boardwalk to prove it. I was excited for the standard hike, but extra excited because there is the option of continuing along a ridge trail that goes east along the rest of the Stirling Range to the edge of the park. It’s over 20km point to point, so given that I would have to hope to hitchhike back from a barely used trailhead (and, honestly, that I’m in terrible shape) I made the wise decision to just hike out as far as I could handle and then turn and head back. It was a bummer looking at the ridge stretching out ahead of me so invitingly and having to turn around, but it was definitely the right move that day. And I still had an awesome time on the hike.

After that… it was time to go! I was headed back into the absolute middle of nowhere and, frankly, quite happy about it. Hanging around more populated places seems to drag me from good habits to bad, and doesn’t bring me that much joy. In the middle of nowhere there’s really no reason to stay up late, (hopefully) no service for me to anesthetize myself staring at my phone, and untouched landscapes of almost every kind bring me a lot of happiness and wonder. The only “major” “metropolis” for the next 1,000+ kilometers would be Esperance, population just under 14,000.

East of Esperance the famous Nullarbor begins, and the official Nullarbor Conservation Area starts just across the border in the southwest corner of South Australia. Every single person here I’ve told that I’m doing a lap around the country has pretty quickly gone “Oh, you’re going to have to cross the Nullarbor!”. I didn’t know too much of what to expect, besides the fact that it’s flat, largely barren, and there is a stretch called the 90 mile straight, self-explanatorily.

Well, I absolutely loved the Nullarbor. It certainly is flat, and the road is straight for long stretches, but it’s not nearly as barren as I’d been led to believe. It’s what I’ve come to feel is pretty classic Australian desert scrub bushland, and as the kilometers roll by you can see subtle shifts in the size and density of the bushes. There is a specific area called the treeless plain (again, descriptive if artless naming), but otherwise there are a decent mix of trees, huge bushes, and small shrubs. On the Western Australia side the road follows the coast to the south with a bluff rising up in the desert to the north. Right before the South Australia border the road climbs that bluff, which pretty suddenly turns into a couple hundred kilometers of cliffs being pounded by the surf of the Great Australian Bight, turquoise where it meets the land and darkening to a deep navy blue towards the horizon.

It is an absolutely spectacular landscape. The skies are gigantic. The wind howls constantly. The ocean is beautiful and forbidding, whipped into whitecaps, crashing into the cliffs. Rugged is the perfect description of this area, and camping out by the cliffs, van shaking in the wind, that ruggedness is transmitted faithfully into your bones in the best, most awe-inspiring way that only nature can. Obviously the people who’d felt the need to warn me about this and the 90 mile straight have never driven through Kansas…

After crossing over from WA I spent the night just on the other side of the border in SA, out by the cliffs. I bundled up against the (welcome, after so much roasting in WA) chill and drank tea out by the edge of the cliffs, soaking it all in. The next day I woke up to just the perfect weather for the area—partly cloudy, patches of blue sky here and there, and a couple of narrow columns of rain with the occasional lightning bolt cascading down dotted throughout the massive landscape. I made slow progress east, pulling in to every clifftop viewpoint I could find, appreciating the rumble of the thunder, and generally just having a great day.

But of course all good things must come to an end, and as the saying goes, after cliffs, farmland. So much farmland. Agriculture is a big deal in SA, and, yeah. The next few days were mostly spent trying to stay awake and focused as field upon field rolled by. This was what people should’ve warned me about. One night camped next to a field I at least got treated to a truly spectacular sunset.

I’ve spent the past few days driving around the outside of the Eyre Peninsula, which is basically just farmland in the middle and a string of cute beach vacation towns with massive grain silos along the coast. It’s pretty and sleepy and that’s about it. One highlight was going to Coffin Bay National Park, where I went for a beautiful couple hour stroll and saw lots of emus, including one with a gaggle of babies following it.

That brings us roughly to the present day. I’ll get to the end of the Eyre Peninsula either today or tomorrow, and then I’ll be quite close to Adelaide. I’m juggling the timing to get an oil change once auto shops hopefully reopen next week while also exploring around here and leaving town to check out a few places in Victoria before I get to Melbourne. We’ll see how it all shakes out. You can find videos for this post here—turn on your sound for howling wind and silly commentary.