Highlights from the Nullarbor

This year seems to be the year of giving the bucket list a good nudge... foreboding sign or fortuitous? I say that I live under the lucky star! A few weeks ago a friend called to ask if I wanted to drive across the Nullarbor. Once I had ascertained that he wasn't smoking crack and questioned the three hundred reasons to say no that my mind immediately came up with, I said yes! We left just two short weeks later. So if you've been wondering why I've been a little quiet, its because I have been marveling at the outrageous beauty of the Australian outback. I've also now got tickets on myself because I slept on the back of a ute... and rugged folk that sleep on the back of utes are strong and silent types. Which makes it a little difficult to blog. I'm too sexy for my blog, too sexy for a motel, too sexy by far... Just joking Joyce. I'll never be too sexy for Queen B. I tried strong and silent for about 5 minutes and was so fascinated with the conversation going on in my own head that I just had to share it! Anyhow... if you happen to randomly get an invitation from a friend that you randomly met when you were helping someone else set up a tradeshow and they had to do a media interview and so you decided that you'd help the guy over there set up his trade show stand because he was on his own, and then it just so happened that you ended up being good friends with the guy you helped and he happened to have a screw loose and to decide at the last minute that it seemed like a good idea to drive across the Nullarbor... THEN SAY YES! Better still if it's a bloke because there's nothing they can do to worm out of a conversation when you're driving at 120km's an hour. You can get into the real nitty gritty of life's existential questions. Fun. Having said all of that, the beauty of the Nullarbor in observing the detail. What may look like hundreds of kilometers of scrub on the surface reveals eagles, granite stacks, road kill, fallen down homesteads, derelict towns... everywhere nature reclaiming it's own. I'll leave it to the pictures to do the remainder of the talking. Cate xx and just to give you some idea of scale... (Mitch is 6ft 2") (note: Pildappa Rock is unsignposted so you need to know about it, and Minippa to find it). Like many of the 'towns' on the map, Calca consisted of this derelict house, with a church opposite. The house was grafitied with "New Owner Jesus"... it was also where I found the most amazing new pair of "candlesticks" (Mitch called them cam shafts, to me they looked like incredible candlesticks... I'll do a before and after blog post once I've fixed them up)! (about 40km's out of Streaky Bay... again, well worth a visit). Again the photograph below gives you a sense of scale... the little person is 6ft 2". Ceduna - every coastal town has an extremely long pier for fishing vessels and cargo ships to pull up at... and for travellers to stretch their legs. Another unmarked find with miles and miles of sand dunes as far as the eye could see. The old telegraph station at Eucla was consumed by sand dunes when a rabbit plague saw dune vegetation obliterated. That's me in the photo! I've skipped the photographs of Green's Pools at Denmark (WA) simply because they don't do it justice. It is a MUST SEE. Extraordinarily beautiful. As beautiful were the tingle tree forests... the last remaining 6,000 hectares of tingle trees in the world. This amazing tree below is alive. The trees regenerate during bush fire and are known for their massive hollow trunks. I was walking along Busselton Pier as this little guy caught his first ever fish! I captured the moment (and MMS'd it to his dad's phone!)... what a beautiful moment. I often feel like that when I discover something new about beeswax. And just incase you thought I was joking... here's the accommodation And just in case you thought that my life didn't revolve around bees... here's one I found in Streaky Bay (lame photograph, I know, but it was the only bee I saw on the entire trip and I was VERY excited about it. If you get the chance, do it. If the chance doesn't appear, make it happen.