Imagine a drive, a thousand miles long with no turns or bends, across a vast featureless plain with repetitive landscape, and hundreds of kilometers between towns and service stations. That’s Eyre Highway, the road that connects Western Australia to Southern Australia via the Nullarbor Plain, a flat and treeless, giant bed of limestone 200,000 square kilometres in area. With no hills or lakes to obstruct, the highway was laid down as a straight road that runs for 1,675 km from Port Augusta in the east to Norseman in the west, and includes what is said to be the longest straight stretch of road in the world Australia: 145.6 kilometres, between the small roadhouse communities of Balladonia and Caiguna (the longest straight road in the world is Highway 10 in Saudi Arabia, which is 162 miles long).

A set of road signs just west of the Nullarbor Roadhouse, South Australia, warning of camels, wombats and kangaroos crossing the Eyre Highway for the next 96 km in a westerly direction. Photo credit