The Crossing Moonera Tank rest area
Back Out With A Clearer Head
After the sensible half-day rest at Cocklebiddy, I stepped back onto the Eyre Highway with Madura split over two days, winter in the sky, and the Nullarbor doing its strange mix of beauty, ache, and dead-roo reality.
The half-day rest at Cocklebiddy had done what it needed to do.
It had not magically given me a new body. My feet did not wake up as if the previous month had never happened. But the decision to stop early the day before had taken some pressure out of the day. I had listened to the body, let the weather pass over us, answered a few things, eaten, rested, and given myself half a chance of stepping back out with a clearer head.
Mentally, I had hit a low spot in Cocklebiddy. The shirt and social-media email had landed hard, but I had replied, explained the reality of life on the crossing, and then given myself the rest of the day to stop carrying it quite so tightly. By the next morning, I felt refreshed mentally and physically.
That was the first job on Day 32: step back out.
Madura was the next roadhouse, about 89 kilometres away. That was too far for one sensible day, so the plan was simple enough: cover about half of it, park up at a free unpowered camp site or rest area, then do the second half the next day and finish at Madura.
Moonera Tank rest area became the useful stopping point for that first half.
There is not much romance in that sentence, but HAA was full of days like that. A name on the map. A patch of ground where the campervan could stop. A distance that made tomorrow possible. Out there, that counted.
The morning started under a heavy winter sky. The photos from early on have that bruised grey-purple look, the sort of light that makes the highway feel longer before the day has properly opened. It looked as though the weather might stay on our side, but winter was definitely with us now, and dry conditions felt like something to appreciate while they lasted.
After Cocklebiddy, the Eyre Highway was back to being the whole working world. Move for a while. Check in. Eat something. Adjust the layers. Look up at the sky. Keep going. Repeat until the day had turned into enough kilometres.
That stretch had a strange double feeling to it.
It really was a joy and a privilege to be walking through places like that. The sky could be spectacular. The light kept changing. A patch of cloud, a break in the weather, a line of scrub, a bird in a dead tree, a sign to somewhere I had never heard of: small things could suddenly feel enormous because there was so much space around them.
At the same time, it was not all wonder.
The body still hurt. There were aches, doubts, tired legs, and the familiar flicker between “why am I doing this??” and “this is exactly why I am doing this!!” Some days that switch could flip back and forward within the same kilometre.
And then there were the kangaroos.
Seeing them alive out there was wonderful. Huge mobs moving through that landscape made the country feel properly alive. But the roadside was grim. By this stage we were seeing dead kangaroos everywhere, and the smell could be foul. It was a reality I had not anticipated, and it was unavoidable. You would catch the stench, then it would grow stronger as you got closer to another dead roo.
There is no tidy way to turn that into a pretty travel sentence. It was like the kangaroo version of the Somme, and somehow it sat alongside the joy: beautiful country, huge skies, live animals bounding through the scrub, and then the stink of the ones that had not made it across the highway.
Ben got so sick of the smell that he swore he would never eat kangaroo.
I am not sure whether he kept that vow, but I understood the feeling.
By the time the walking stopped, I had added 44.4 kilometres to the crossing. The accumulated activity-distance total sat at 1324.8 kilometres.
The day did not end in a town, or a roadhouse meal, or a big encounter. It ended at Moonera Tank rest area, a free unpowered stop, which was exactly what we needed it to be: somewhere practical to stop, sleep, reset, and leave Madura for tomorrow.
After the previous day’s pause, that was enough. I was moving again. The plan had a shape again. The winter sky was still above us, the campervan was still there, and we had taken another quiet step east.
Images From The Day
