Wednesday 11th April 2018
Eucla to Esperance we hope. 913km about 9hrs 22mins driving time. Eeeek!!! I might have to do a bit more than usual.
A big driving day. We set off early for a change, about 8.30am Eucla time which is an interesting time zone. See note below.
We managed to arrive at our proposed destination for last night at 11.30am this morning. Lucky we stopped when we did last night. Obviously it was a little ambitious with our current tour director. We travelled on Australia’s longest straight between Cocklebiddy and Balladonia (146km of straight road).
We had a few interesting points of interest today in the form of sideshow trees (Teddy, bra, cup and undie trees).
We also saw many different modes of transport to keep us entertained, which I will show in the photos.
Having lost more vegetables at the quarantine station last night and not being overly impressed with our last 2 nights roadhouse/pub meals, we are looking forward to a home cooked meal tonight.
Well we are almost to our destination for tonight, only 100km to go and it is only 6pm. Hopefully we will be set up by 7ish Broadbent time, which is give or take about 12-20mins.
Nighty Night.
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- Eucla Motel and Caravan Park. A little patch of dirt..
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- Nigel resting up for the big drive today.
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- We met up with our boatie friends again last night. Johnny Mitchell…
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- and Ali.
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- Johnny all prepared for the fly onslaught this morning. They were nuts.
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- The Avoca boatie convoy
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- The view from the park out to the ocean
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- One of many trees of interest. This one being the cup tree
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- Our first meeting with this unusual aircraft at the petrol bowser at Mundrabilla Service centre. Two seater helicopter.
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- Mundrabilla. A not so friendly petrol bowser. As you can imagine DB only put in enough petrol to get us to Norseman where the price was only 159.9 where he only put in enough petrol to get us to Esperance where it went back to 139.9
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- Lookout west of Mundrabilla out over the plains
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- another pic from the lookout
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- Just 146km of straight road..
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- .. Love it. Much preferred to driving on the F3. Not much traffic. I love cruise control.
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- The road trains are so long but I have only had to pass a couple of them. Don’t really like overtaking on the wrong side of the road even though you can see forever.
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- We met our helicopter again at Cocklebiddy…
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- ..and again at Balladonia. He has flown into a headwind all day.
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- Another couple of different vehicles along the way.
Australia’s Weird Little Time Zone
Continental Australia is divided into three standard time zones, Western, Central and Eastern. Overall, Australian time is fairly straightforward and understandable.
However Australia also has an unofficial but de facto hybrid time zone called “Australian Central Western Standard Time” (ACWST), which is set halfway between the official Western and Central times. With Western Time at UTC+8:00 and Central Time at UTC+9:30, splitting the difference makes the so-called Central Western Time UTC+8:45. Yes, a time zone that’s based not on the hour or the half-hour, but on the quarter hour!
This is quite rare, something found nowhere else except Nepal and in a few small, isolated corners of the globe. Visitors entering or leaving ACWST have to remember to set their watches in the proper direction either forward or back by 45 minutes.
ACWST is observed only in a tiny sliver in the far southeastern corner of Western Australia along the Eyre Highway, extending from just outside of Caiguna to about 50 metres across the South Australia state line to encompass Border Village, for a total length of about 340 kilometres. The northern boundary is less precise but it doesn’t really matter. This is part of the Nullarbor Plain, a vast, dry, flat, expanse of scrubland and not much else besides nature. Time doesn’t really matter in that immense empty acreage north of the Eyre Highway.