We made good progress on the Eyre Highway. Kimba is very much a wheat growing area. The next sizable town is Ceduna on the coast. It has a more mixed economy. Going west from there you encounter a few more small wheat growing towns until at Penong you find a store that declares that it’s the last shop for a thousand kilometers.
The mallee woodland slowly peters out until you’re on the treeless plain that is the Nullarbor. There is practically no surface water out there partly because not a lot of rain falls but also because the limestone lets it all run straight through. In the summer of 1841 Edward John Eyre set out to walk from Fowlers Bay to King George Sound – the modern day Albany which is just down the road from where we are camped on the bank of the Kalgan River. He covered the 1368 km trip in about 5 months, five men set out, two arrived.
Eyre found water at Eucla. The modern day traveler finds a quarantine inspection site. The rules are complicated but basically fruit, vegetables, honey and soil can’t go with you into Western Australia.
From there west the landscape changes back into patchy woodland, then the trees become taller and more continuous and, once you’re off the Eyre Highway you enter wheat country again.
bobmcgee 