The CrossingFirst full day in South Australia
Beautifully Bleak South Australia
My first full day in South Australia was wet, empty and fifty kilometres long. A roadside chat with Craig from highway maintenance was the bright spot in a day built mostly from one foot after the other.
The morning after the first border crossing was straight back to the job.
At 4.50am we drove from Border Village to where I’d stopped the previous evening, about 25 kilometres inside South Australia.
This was my first full day on South Australian soil.
It was also the start of two unpowered roadside nights. After a run of powered roadhouse campsites, that changed the shape of the next couple of days for the crew. Charging things, keeping food sorted, managing water, hoping Telstra behaved itself between roadhouses: none of it was dramatic, but all of it mattered.
By then we were getting to be old hands at it.
The day itself arrived under a heavy, strange sky.
The coastal plain was becoming flatter and emptier, and a thick blanket of cloud sat over everything. It felt a bit alien. Beautifully bleak, which was the phrase that came to mind at the time and still fits. There were moments of sunshine later, but mostly it was wet, grey, and plain in a way that stripped the day back to the basics.
The closest I can get to describing that early part of the day is that it felt like the opening of a sci-fi horror, where the sun was technically up but you could not really tell, the silence was absolute, and you were not entirely sure whether anyone else was still alive.
One foot in front of the other.
That sounds obvious, but on a day like this it really was the whole job. Yesterday had carried the emotion of the border. Today I still had to walk the next 50 kilometres.
Then Craig appeared and brightened the morning.
Craig worked in highway maintenance for the South Australian government. He was born and bred in Ceduna, and the Eyre Highway was his office, his local knowledge, and in some ways his home patch.
He was very friendly, happy, and great to chat to.
He had seen all sorts of people doing all sorts of strange charity efforts on the Nullarbor. My favourite story was the hospital bed that was being pushed across the country until its wheels got caught in a cattle grid.
That made my setup seem almost sensible.
Craig was also a fellow ex-smoker who had lost a lot of weight because he wanted to be fit and healthy enough to enjoy a long, active, happy life. That part mattered to me. HAA kept bringing me into contact with people whose stories were not the same as mine, but had little echoes in them: a decision, a change, a line drawn somewhere.
I would see Craig again over the next few days, and I understood why he loved that part of the world. It could look empty from a car window, or even from the side of the highway with sore feet, but there was life in it if you had the patience to notice.
The rest of the day stayed wet and steady. Vast expanses of beautiful nothingness, with the occasional huge truck for company.
The photos tell the weather better than I can: dark early highway, low cloud, sudden blue gaps, scrubland running away toward the horizon, then more grey. It was not a dramatic day in the border-crossing sense. It was not a people-everywhere day either. It was a working day. The sort of day when I quietly walked a huge distance because there was nothing much to do except keep going.
By the end I had added 50.1 kilometres.
The activity-distance total was 1648.8 kilometres.
We spent the night unpowered at Lookout 2 Rest Area. Food, sleep and the next start waiting outside the van.
Videos From The Day
Eerie South Australian morning
A low-light Day 39 clip from the first full South Australian morning, trying to describe the eerie, alien silence of the coastal plain.
Open on YouTubeGrinding out the South Australian kilometres
A Day 39 roadside short about grinding out the kilometres through beautiful nothingness, with huge trucks for company.
Open on YouTubeWide load on the Eyre Highway
A short Day 39 clip of a wide load rolling through the otherwise empty Eyre Highway landscape.
Open on YouTubeImages From The Day
