Murray minutes

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A cruise down the Murray River was on the agenda for today, but I quickly began to realise why the company organising the tour was called Prime Mini-Tours. It wasn't a boast about the tour being prime amongst a group of lesser tours, more an indication that most people going on it were in the prime of life. Other people fooled by this were a Japanese guy and a Dutch family.

On the way out of Adelaide the driver indicated the O-bahn, a cunningly engineered "railroad" on which normal city buses can get out to the suburbs at high speed, and with no traffic hold-up. Some sort of buffer flicks up from the side of the bus and then locks into guide rails on either side of the O-bahn, meaning the bus follows the direction of the track and needs minimal interaction from the driver.

A slightly less high-tech but equally impressive invention could be found on the central reservation - small black nets at regular intervals to enable koala bears to climb over on their way across the road. Granted, they still have to negotiate six lanes of 100 km/h traffic in order to reach the other side, but the absence of any koala corpses suggests their traffic savvy is fairly good for a creature that spends two thirds of the day asleep.

First stop was Mannum, and a lookout point enabled us to appreciate the scale of the 1956 flood of the Murray, which had created a vast swimming pool up to the level of the first floor of the town buildings.

We then transferred to the boat itself, a small affair that was predominantly enclosed but with a narrow walkway around the outside. The pilot provided occasional historical and botanical commentary.

Though the weather was glorious, the scenery wasn't quite what I was expecting. It seems as though a red gum tree is only red when you chop it down and peer at the inside - otherwise it looks like a tree-coloured tree. So the scores of red gum trees lining the banks lacked a certain redness. We also passed some layered rock formations in which some well-preserved fossils had been found.

The Murray ecosystem has been greatly disturbed by so-called "introduced" species, many of which were brought over from the UK by early immigrants to make Australia more like home. One example is the weeping willow - these have enormous root systems, drink huge quantities of water, and make the river bank inaccessible from either direction. Another example is the European carp, originally introduced as an ornamental garden fish but then released into the wild when they got too big - they're now the dominant fish in the river, partly due to having no predators, and partly due to being a bottom feeder, meaning they stir up the river bed silt, which is where all the local fish lay their eggs. If you catch a carp, or any other introduced fish, you are supposed to kill it or face a $2,000 fine.

Mannum itself is a major houseboat hiring centre, with this being such big business that the law allows you to pilot a houseboat using simply a car driving licence, the reasoning being that if a pilot's licence were needed then much of the custom would be lost. The scary thing about this is that some of the houseboats are huge. And the silly thing about this is that if you have a small dinghy attached to your enormous houseboat, you do need a pilot's licence.

To illustrate the risk element in this, new hirers generally find it difficult to steer straight, due to a combination of there being no lane markings as there are on a road, and the steering being done from the front of the boat, rendering it difficult to check the boat's alignment. We encountered one such new hirer several times on the cruise, constantly over-steering and zigzagging all over the river.

After the cruise, we visited a local museum, followed by a chocolate factory (I sampled a grim hot chilli chocolate) and finally a visit to Mount Lofty. The latter is normally visited in the morning (but we didn't have time as we were late for the boat) and affords a supposedly great view of Adelaide, which is sadly impossible to see if you visit it late in the afternoon with the sun shining directly in your eyes.

Today was most definitely not a victory for political correctness, with numerous "women drivers" comments being thrown around on the boat because of the female pilot, and a sighting of some gollywogs at the chocolate factory. This is not America.

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Photos

Inn at Mannum
In the Great Flood of 1956 (?), the water was up to the first balcony.