Across Australia, Part Two: World’s rarest coffee; Eucla, a tale of rabbits and sand; the Nullarbor Nymph – the myth and the restaurant; distressingly rum do’s at the Eucla Motor Hotel bar; over the border to South Australia; nasty Nundroo; forbidden fruit confiscation; oysters at Ceduna; Kimba – halfway across Australia; Port Augusta; a most surprising billboard
For Part One, Days 1 to 3, click here.
DAY 4: Cocklebiddy to Eucla (280km)
To recap Part 1, we’re driving from Perth WA to Brisbane QLD. That pink bit on the map below is the Nullabor Plain, which we’re taking three days to cross.
After hundreds of flat, topographically featureless kilometres, it was almost a shock to find ourselves on Madura Pass, the hilly approach to Madura Roadhouse.
From Madura Pass, you look out over the Roe Plains down to the Great Australian Bight – which, on a clear day, you would probably see.
This is my first experience of the GAB from terra firma. Last time around, we were cruising* across it on the good ship Viking Sun, heading from Sydney to Durban via multiple Aussie ports, Mauritius, Madagascar and Maputo.
(* More accurately, Roy was cruising, while I was cabin-bound and flat on my back, gently heaving. Here is a link to one of my post about that otherwise fabulous cruise.)
The immediate appeal of the clean, tidy Madura Roadhouse and the motel cabins dotted about under trees might have been a testament to the relative awfulness of last night’s accommodation at Cocklebiddy.
Zac, the Brilliant Barista at Mundrabilla Roadhouse
Having stopped at all the roadhouses so far, we had to check out Mundrabilla Roadhouse, too – and it’s a good thing we did. Barista Zac, at the bar, made us a couple of the best cups of coffee we’ve had in WA. Here’s the artwork he performed on Roy’s flat-white-extra-shot-extra-hot-two-sweeteners. See the little moon face?
A soulful type, who had to close his Melbourne café due to Covid lockdowns, he told us he’d once had a $200 shot of espresso at a Melbourne coffee fair: it was Panama geisha, sometimes called gesha, a super-rare bean with flavours of mango, apricot and chocolate, he said reverently. It sounded like a semi-religious experience. (No, he didn’t have to pay for it.)
Eucla – swallowed up by ravenous rabbits and shifting sands
Having covered the 280km from Cocklebiddy to Eucla by noon, even including the two coffee stops (at Madura and Mundrabilla), there was plenty of time to head down the escarpment, and along the first unpaved road of our journey, to the site of the original port settlement of Eucla.
It’s a sad and eerie story. Gazetted as a township in 1887, and fairly important as a telegraph station, old Eucla boasted a jetty and a tramline, reaching its zenith in the 1920s before a new telegraph line was installed to the north.
In 1890, the area was visited by a plague of rabbits that ate up all the vegetation and destabilised the dunes, leading to gradual engulfment of the small town by sand. There are some famous ruins, including one of a telegraph station.
According to the sign below, of which there are several, many of the structures were dismantled and their materials reused for construction of alternative buildings 4km inland, up on the escarpment where the Eucla Motel currently stands.
I didn’t make it to the jetty ruins, as I took the wrong path and the wind was becoming increasingly unpleasant; but Jenny and Neil Fitzclarence, an interesting couple in a blue Subaru whose path we crossed several times, sent me a few great pics – and here they are:
Thanks, Neil!
Review: Eucla Motor Hotel
Current manager Christina’s aunt and uncle built the original motel on this site in 1967, and her cousin – presently on holiday – owns it now. If I remember rightly, Christina’s own parents built the Border Roadhouse and motel, 12km east of Eucla, in 1973.
Christina and Phil come from the Byron Bay area of New South Wales. It’s famous for its herbs, apparently, and she does have that aura of the beautiful, silver-haired hippie goddess about her.
Though all her deluxe and standard rooms were booked, Christina promised to make a plan to save us from the dire fate of a budget room with shared shower-block facilities – if we didn’t mind waiting. We didn’t. Our window table at the motel café was good for traveller-watching.
The cliff-top executive room, a swish new cabin perched at the edge of the escarpment with wondrous views across the coastal plain to the turquoise-fringed sea, was well worth the $180 charged. It hadn’t been used for a while: something to do with a dodgy door lock, and no TV reception. Never mind. We had a proper, enclosed shower. We had a chi-chi sofa. We even had fairy lights! We had loungers and a barbecue on our verandah – though the wind out there might have blown us into the Bight.
Motel restaurant the Nullarbor Nymph is named after widely publicised reports in 1971 of a half-naked blonde who had gone wild and lived and ran with the kangaroos. It turned out to be a hoax, disappointingly.
Also disappointing, if not downright distressing, was that the bar had run out of gin. Ordering a shot of Bundaberg Yellow Label Rum to go with my tonic was a bad idea. This was nothing like the smooth and yummy Beenleigh dark rum that is also made in QLD; click here for my post on our visit to the Beenleigh distillery last year. (In fact, I found the Bundaberg undrinkable, and that’s most unlike me.)
From the short dinner menu at the Nullabor Nymph, we had the crisp and delicious fried fish, chips and salad ($25).
DAY 5: Eucla to Ceduna (490km)
Just 12km east of Eucla is where you cross from Western Australia into South Australia. Travellers like us no longer have to stop at the border, but it seems the road trains do – possibly for weighing, cargo checking and so on.
From Eucla, it’s 200km to Nullarbor Roadhouse, where we stopped for coffee and pecan pie, and where Roy took over the driving for the remaining 300m to Ceduna.
After Border, the road narrowed and lost most of its hard shoulders. (There’s a famously treeless stretch of the Nullarbor along this route, complete with signs. I wonder what they do if and when a tree dares to grow here? – quickly chop it down?)
Nasty Nundroo
Whoever called Madura the worst roadhouse in Australia cannot possibly have stopped at Nundroo Hotel Motel and tavern. We found a depressing place frequented by unsettling clientele and presided over by a haunted-looking middle-aged woman to whose lot it had somehow fallen to simultaneously cook and serve the food, make hot drinks and also man the bar inconveniently located (for her, at least) in a far corner.
Without this warning from me, how would you know not, never, under any circumstances to book yourself into Nundroo online? You wouldn’t know – and that’s a scary thought. (TripAdvisor agrees.)
Forbidden Fruit – Intolerable!
On the western side of Ceduna is a quarantine station, whose purpose is to interrogate you about any fruit you may be attempting to traffic over the border and to confiscate it from you.
Though I had seen several dire warnings like the one above – nailed up in toilet cubicles in Nullarbor roadhouses – about the lethal effects of mutant fruit flies on the local agrarian economy, nothing had prepared us for The Uniform who demanded to search the camper trailer for forbidden fruit.
Roy had no idea how to get into the camper trailer, and said so. After all, we were merely taking it to Brisbane for son Carl.
Somewhat mollified by a sacrificial offering from our own cooler bag – a cucumber, two perfect avos and three lemons for my G&Ts (sob), The Uniform let us go with a stern warning: “Don’t let this happen again, it is not tolerable.”
Roy, naturally, was inclined to be furious at the loss of the avos, especially. I was more relieved that The Uniform hadn’t (a) confiscated the trailer, and/or (b) fined us heftily. From watching that Aussie TV series – Border Security? – it’s quite possible that he had the right to stand us against the quarantine office wall and summarily execute us.
Ceduna
Ceduna is described as an isolated port and service town at the edge of the Great Australia Bight, and as the last easterly stop before entering “the wastelands of the Nullarbor Plain and the vast flatlands that lie to the north of the GAB”. Thevenard is the nearby port; both it and Ceduna are located on Murat Bay.
Famous for seafood, especially oysters, Ceduna is “set amidst a patchwork of grain farms, natural bush and rugged rocky bays, secluded white sandy beaches and wilderness”.
I would love to be able to say that I had a pleasant walk along the attractive foreshore of this popular little holiday town, but I am not. The weather was too windy and generally grim to venture more than a couple of hundred metres beyond the Ceduna Foreshore Hotel.
Review: Ceduna Foreshore Caravan Park
Ceduna Foreshore Caravan Park, and our two-bedroom superior cabin/villa number C14, was a total delight: the best accommodation we’d had so far. (Not that that is saying very much.) What was more, the caravan park kitchens and showers were remarkably new, clean and fancy.
Avos for lunch would have been good; but no – they were either in the bin at the quarantine station, or Uniform Man was enjoying them for his lunch. (Mustn’t dwell; moving on.)
Ceduna Oyster Bar, on the edge of town, is said to be a local highlight. We got our oyster fix at the Ceduna Foreshore Bistro, less than a five-minute walk through the caravan park and through the bottom gate. It’s a typical Aussie seafront hotel and restaurant that caters for large numbers in the holiday season; even tonight was pretty full. (Saturday night in Ceduna. Who cares what’s on the menu?)
To share a dozen local natural oysters ($32) was the obvious choice when in Ceduna. From the Specials board, Roy ordered the lamb shank and veggies ($27); I stuck with the mollusc theme and had the scallops ($22). In compensation for them bringing Roy the wrong meal first time round, they gave us a complimentary sticky date pudding with berries, cream and ice cream ($12 if we’d had to pay for it). It would have been rude to refuse.
DAY 6: Ceduna to Port Augusta (468km)
I would love to take the coastal route from Ceduna to Adelaide some day… but our plan for now was to get to Brisbane over the shortest possible route.
That shortest possible route happens to be the Eyre Highway, which cuts straight across from the coastal town of Ceduna to the port town of Port Augusta.
This is mainly farmland, with Vitterra silo-dominated tiny agricultural towns to the left – Willura, Poochera and Minnipa, all with lovely stone signs at their entrance, but their main streets all but rolled up: let’s assume that’s because it was a Sunday.
There being nothing at Kyancutta but a sign, we stopped to change drivers. (And some ad hoc roadside bladder relief, if you must know.)
Had we known that the nearby town of Kimba was an actual town, we might have pinched for a bit longer. Kimba is famous for being “Halfway Across Australia”, and possibly also for this giant pink bird. I’m guessing it’s a galah; Roy reckons parrot is good enough. Kimba Roadhouse, manned by at least three hard-working Sikh men, is well-known for its curries and was super-busy. Not surprising, with most of the oppo closed on Sundays.
Port Augusta
Review: Crossroads Ecomotel
Alan McMahon is the proprietor of this award-winning eco-hotel. I liked the sign at reception “Our worst regrets are the things we didn’t buy.” A man after my own heart. He bemoaned how I’d come in on the booking.com Genius programme, allowing us to pay just $125 for our Deluxe King Room, and slashing his margins to ribbons. “At this price, it’s your lucky day,” he said. Of course I apologised.
Apart from several relatively salubrious looking fast-food places, if that’s what you fancy, he recommended two places for dinner, each an easy five-minute walk from the Ecomotel. Firstly, turn right out of the gate to the Western Hotel’s bar and bistro for good, well-priced meals. (Behind the Western, you can turn left to the Augusta Hotel, near the boat ramp; it’s also recommended for dinner.)
Secondly, the Standpipe Hotel/Motel, located in an atmospheric colonial-style building just off the A1, which you have to cross by foot unless you opt to drive the short distance. It’s huge, and it was packed – even on a Sunday night.
Apart from an Australian menu, it offers a comprehensive North Indian menu that’s not to be missed. After starters of samosas (one fragrant veg, one spicy lamb) and papadums with mint chutney, Roy had the dhal makhana and the Goan fish curry – Goan, Roy! – and I the Standpipe thali: butter chicken, channa dhal and some sort of lamb, which came with rice, papadums and a couple of outstanding naans. Washed down with a cheeky bottle of Verdelho ($25), the total meal came to $109.
End of Part Two
To round off Part Two, here’s a government-sponsored billboard that’s unconventional, to say the least. Next up, Part Three – as soon as I get around to it.
Love it Verne, sounds like the crossing is starting to agree with you a bit more. Getting more used to it after Part 1, I suppose. Happy travels!
Such detail in your story telling and fantastic photos of your journey.
I enjoyed reading it. Thank you for sharing.
Excellent story and pics, you lucky peeps.
Thanks, Garry!
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