Advertisement
Published: December 1st 2022
1b. Mt Gambier
One of the many old buildings in Mount GambierAfter a relaxed start to the day, we set off to see the Engelbrecht Cave, which was only a 5min drive away. They do guided tours on the hour, we’d just missed one so booked up for the next one and sat outside enjoying the sunshine with a coffee while we waited. The time went pretty quickly and before we knew it we were being called in to hear the ‘rules’ and prepare for our tour.
Our tour was pretty busy, 18 people – the earlier one we’d missed only had about 6! But the guide was very good and made sure everyone could hear what was being said. The cave was accessed via a sinkhole (there’s a lot of those around here, we’d be concerned living in this town!) which was quite a lot of steps down into the depths!
This cave has an interesting history, it was owned by Carl Engelbrecht who ran a whisky distillery in a former flour mill. Unfortunately he used one of the dripholes into the cave system as his waste disposal system, even allowing a local abattoir to dump their waste down there too, for a fee. Once he died, the local
2. Umpherston Sinkhole
The Umpherston Sinkhole in the middle of Mt Gambier council then took over the ownership of the cave and used it as a rubbish tip!
It’s taken many, many years hard work to remove 400 cubic tons of waste using shovels and buckets to finally restore it back to how it is today, there is still about 2000 cubic tons in there. The driphole used for tipping the original waste is coated in black residue and much larger than it would otherwise have been, thanks to the various caustic wastes eating away at the limestone.
The guide also mentioned the fact that before a lot of the waste had been cleared and when the water level was much higher than it is now, local teenagers used to sneak into the cave, crawl over the rubbish, then swim in the water. They illuminated the cave using candles on upturned jar lids floating on wooden planks – you could still see the soot marks on the limestone where the candles had floated to the edges of the pool.
Our next stop was the Umpherston Sinkhole, which was really impressive. It’s quite a large sinkhole, around 50m across and has tiered gardens at the bottom. There’s a large variety
3. Blue Lake
The Blue Lake is formed from the convergence of two volcano craters, the water is an amazing colour due to its purity of plants all around the edges of the sinkhole and when you get to the bottom you can hear the very loud buzzing of swarms of bee’s which have made their nests in the overhang near the top of the sinkhole. Fortunately, they don’t bother people very much they just swarm around in a cloud by their nests.
After this, we visited the Blue Lake, which is the towns main water supply. The lake is formed by two volcano craters which have merged together, Mount Gambier actually has a total of eight volcano’s (dormant thankfully!). The lake is basically like a huge bowl with water in the bottom. You can’t get near to the actual water but are able to drive or walk around the top rim, the colour of the lake is out of this world. In the summer months, it’s such a vivid blue, so hard to capture in a photo but it was amazing to see.
We did drive further round and look at the Valley Lake, which was picturesque but compared to the Blue Lake it seemed very ordinary!
Our final stop of the day was a trip to Naracoorte Caves, this was
4. Valley Lake
Next to the Blue Lake is Valley Lake, the water is less pure hence the colour, Mt Gambier is made up of eight volcanos about an hour drive north of Mount Gambier. It was a nice drive, the first part took you through a large area of planted forest, they produce a lot of wood over here but carefully manage the forest area’s ensuring cleared area’s are replanted so you see large area’s of trees in all different stages of growth.
A little further on and the trees disappear and are replaced with miles and miles of vineyards. Some very old vines, then large sections of newly planted vines all stretching as far as the eye can see in all directions. It was a shame we didn’t have time to stop and any of the vineyards as some invited people to stop to taste their wines – we must get round to sorting a wine tour soon!
Naracoorte Caves did not disappoint, we decided to do a self guided tour of the ‘Stick Tomato’ cave, which has automated lights which turn on as you pass through the cave. This was amazing as we were the only people in there so you could really appreciate how peaceful it was when you got to the end of the cave area they allowed you to
7. Naracoorte Caves
The entrance to Naracoorte Caves, thats his tail btw :) explore. We spent about 30mins wandering around in here all by ourselves.
We’d also booked onto a guided tour at 3:30pm of the Alexandra Cave, when we met our guide, Des, back at the main building we found out we were the only 2 booked on this tour! So we each got our own torches and set of on our own private tour of the cave.
This was fantastic, it was lovely having a guide all to ourselves and meant we could chat as we walked around and ask lots of questions. There was a section just as we walked in where lots of soil had been removed to create the entrance, they are now researching all the different layers the removal has exposed which date back to well before the ice age! It was fascinating to see and hear about how this could tell us about what caused the extinction of some animals as well tracing patterns in forest fires. This cave was a lovely cool 17 degrees, which it remains at pretty much all year round and is the average for the area. It had loads and loads of stalactites and stalagmites which created some spectacular
5. Stick Tomato Cave
One of the caverns in the Stick Tomato caves at Narracoorte displays, hopefully we’ve managed to get decent photos of the best bits.
We managed to just about fit in a walk around their exhibit in the main tour office before they closed up for the day, which showed a lot of the now extinct animals whose remains have been found in the cave. Apparently, it was quite common for animals to fall into the dripholes where they would either die from the fall, be injured and just wander off to meet their demise or be killed/eaten by other animals (large snakes/lizards!) already in the cave.
By the time we’d finished there we were the only people left on site which made it easy to find the car in the car park!
We noticed on the way in and out of Naracoorte that there were many scorched tree’s surrounding the caves, we’d seen signs with years of the fires as we drove in, but it was only after reading the information in the display that we realised these was planned/controlled burns used to prevent more serious unplanned fires. These burns also cause some seed pods to open for some plants helping them to propagate. Interesting stuff!
We
6. Stick Tomato Roof
The roof of the Stick Tomato cave was shaped when it was completely full of water headed back to Mount Gambier to our room where Roy knocked up a lovely steak dinner – it’s amazing what you can do with two electric hob rings!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.154s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 10; qc: 51; dbt: 0.0488s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
