Wednesday May 11
Mundrabilla
When you see these places on the map you assume they are towns, but each one is just a desolate roadhouse with a gravel "caravan park", 1950's shower block and wildly expensive fridge magnets, or, if you really want to splash out, beer mats with cartoon pictures of 3 camels humping each other. That's if you have any sellable organs left after buying a litre of diesel.
These places are all the vestiges of early stations & camel routes; in the tired prefab buildings the brightly coloured souvenirs try to perpetuate some kind of garbled myth of Aussie outback spirit. The modern reality is a sausage factory of caravans & motorhomes grimly slogging from one petrol bowser to the next, through a landscape strewn with poison baits and truck-squashed kangaroos.
After the Nullarbor, the raggedy trees at Mundrabilla look like a verdant oasis. We gather for a good laugh as two of the other caravanners have a go at this stage of the Nullarbor golf course, watching them trying to actually find it in the scrub. I meet a prospector who has an awesome self-built offroad motorhome; he's off west again to look for gold.
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