#rndtheworldn44 - Day 16 - Streaky Bay to Border Village

December 6, 2017, we were up and at 'em!  We took a long coffee walk through the estuary land around south of Streaky Bay, got ourselves into a dead end, got our feet wet tiptoeing back out, and ran into a grand old pelican who was probably laughing at our ineptness:

Then it was back on the road, striking out along the coast of the Great Australia Bight.  Our lunch stop was in Penong, known for its park of windmills, including what is reputed to be the largest windmill in Australia:

David got pretty excited about the windmills, and tried his best impression of an Australian Outback cowboy:

Before continuing across the Nullarbor on the Eyre Highway, we found an old gravel road down toward the beach. The gravel road crossed between Pink Lake (on the right) and Green Lake (on the left).  The colors of the lakes are due to concentrations of gypsum and other minerals.

To get a better view, Kathy flexed her muscles and climbed one of the gypsum sand dunes --

-- and on our drive back, David tried to reach from one colored lake to the other:

The white dunes made a striking backdrop to the pastel colors of the lakes:

It was hard to capture the colors as the eye saw them.  This is Pink Lake.  You probably get the idea - but to the human eye it was a bright pink, shading to a gorgeous purple.

From Penong, we headed out into the famous Nullarbor!

The Nullarbor Plain (Latin: nullus, "no", and arbor, "tree") is part of the area of flat, almost treeless, arid or semi-arid country of southern Australia, located on the Great Australian Bight coast with the Great Victoria Desert to its north. It is the world's largest single exposure of limestone bedrock, and occupies an area of about 77,000 square miles. At its widest point, which we crossed, it stretches about 684 miles from east to west across the border between South Australia and Western Australia.  The Nullarbor has a desert climate, with arid to semi-arid conditions. Summers can be scorching hot, with daytime temperatures close to 122F, while in winter nights can drop well below freezing.  Again, while we were driving it during the early hot season, we were very lucky that weather was unseasonably cool our entire trip.  For us, daytime temperatures ranged up to 95F, which, because it was not humid, was quite tolerable. 

"Crossing the Nullarbor", for many Australians, is a quintessential experience of the "Australian Outback". Stickers bought from roadhouses on the highway show "I crossed the Nullarbor."  Crossing the Nullarbor in the 1950s and earlier was a significant achievement, as most of the route then was a dirt track of variable quality, and presenting real hazards to the motorist.

The Nullarbor Plain is a former shallow seabed.  It is comprised heavily of limestone and has a reputation as a significant karst region with cave formations.  One theory of its formation is that the whole area was uplifted by crustal movements, and then suffered erosion by wind and rain, reducing its thickness. The plain has most likely never had any major defining topographic features, resulting in the extremely flat terrain across the plain today.  The Murrawijinie Cave in South Australia is open to the public, but we didn't have time to visit it. The Nullarbor is known for extensive meteorite deposits, which are extremely well preserved in the arid climate, some weighing up to several tons.

After a few hours of nothing but nothing, we started to approach the border between Southern Australia and Western Australia, where our destination for the day - Border Village - lay.  This section of the Eyre Highway had some interesting road signs:

Finally, we reached the famous Bunda Cliffs, which were a breathtaking sight:

The Bunda cliffs extend for 62 miles along the Great Australian Bight at the southern edge of the Nullarbor Plain.  The sheer cliffs, which are 200 to 390 feet high, can be seen from several viewpoints along the Eyre Highway near the Nullarbor roadhouse and Border Village.  They are part of a larger scarp of the Eucla Basin that spreads from the western part of South Australia across to the south eastern corner of Western Australia. As a geographical feature, they form part of the longest uninterrupted line of sea cliffs in the world. No other continent or country can match the cliffs for length of coastline.

Speaking of the Nullarbor Roadhouse, we finally arrived there, stopped to get some petrol for the car, took a photo, looked around, and sped on toward Border Village.

Just at dinner time, we arrived at Border Village.  We were greeted by this huge kangaroo holding a can of Vegemite!  Very appropriate for the middle of a very Australian road trip.