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Published: June 15th 2008
No these are not the names of our new friends, just new places we visited on the next leg of our journey around Oz! We have developed a special interest in the Murray River, not sure quite why but it is an Australian icon really - it flows from the Snowy mountains to the coast of South Australia and impacts on such a lot of Australian lives, past and present. Anyway, from Adelaide we headed out to Mannum (May 7th) and stopped a couple of nights in the caravan park right next to the river. Mannum is the main houseboat centre and quite a busy part of the river. A highlight of our stop there was visiting Big Bend - here the river twists around in a wide worm shaped bend, with high red cliffs that catch the light beautifully at sunset.
From here we drove up to the Clare Valley, calling into Cockatoo Ridge in the Barossa en route to stock up on $5 bottles of Hound Dog Shiraz we had discovered on our earlier visit there! The Clare Valley is also a well known wine growing region, well known for its Reisling. We were lucky to strike a
glorious warm sunny weekend while at Clare - spent the first day doing the Reisling bike trail, which runs through the valley behind the vineyards and farms. We managed to cover 32k and visit 2 wineries on our bike ride - slept well that night! The next day was Mothers Day and time to relax, and so we had a Sunday drive around the area to check out the villages where Blu's grandmother spent her childhood, and managed to also find the graves of her grandparents at a tiny settlement called Black Springs. Had a 3 course lunch plus wine for $28 at the "Magpie and Stump" pub at Mintaro (circa 1850) and rounded the day off with a visit to a couple of wineries.
And so to the Yorke Peninsula - this is the small boot shaped piece of land at the bottom of South Australia, not to be confused with Cape York at the top! We found it an interesting place to visit - nice small coastal townships with Cornish heritage, and inland it is all flat dry and dusty crop-growing country. We got a taste for cornish pasties here - the Ardrossan and Moonta bakeries are
especially good!
The Yorke was an easy place to "free camp"- our first night we camped on the top of a cliff beside the sea and no-one came past at all from 4 in the afternoon till 9 the next morning! Very peaceful and quiet - the down side is that spots like this are usually found on dusty gravel roads! The next day we visited the Innes National Park at the tip of the peninsula - spectacular coastal scenery similar to the Eyre Peninsula. Found another nice secluded spot to camp beside the sea that night. Continued around the peninsula to Moonta Bay where we stopped 2 nights - the caravan park there is right on the foreshore which is what you might call a prime camping spot.
Moonta was a nice place to relax - an old copper mining town with a lot of history and easy to get around on pushbikes. Like most Australian coastal ports and seaside towns, the bay itself has a long jetty which is frequented by keen fishermen. Typical though, as we set off with our crab pot to try our luck, the weather turned nasty and a cold front blew in!
Blu knows how to draw a crowd!
swamp hens (or Pukekos in NZ) at the caravan park in MannumLuckily we drove out of it the next morning as we headed north through Port Augusta towards Coober Pedy. A big drive - we did about 450 km that day - stopped the night in a roadside area just north of Woomera, which is famous for being Australia's rocket testing site in its heyday (much of the area is still defence territory and off-limits to the public). Anyway, it was a wet cold night and we discovered that our caravan batteries were flat (long story but we have the problem sorted now we hope). Brendan a fellow roadside camper kindly lent us his battery powerpack so we could see to cook our dinner, but we were very early to bed that night!
Coober Pedy - this is a fascinating place - I don't think you would call it scenic though! Got there about lunchtime and found a nice young man at the garage to recharge our batteries for us and checked into the Oasis Caravan Park, right across from the Drive-In movies. The town itself is pretty much grass free except for the footy oval, and everywhere there are huge mounds of soil - a product of the opal
ferry across the Murray
there are lots of these 24 hour free vehicle and passenger ferries on the Murray mining in the district. Probably about half of the buildings and houses around the town are built underground to escape from the intense summer heat of 50+. We took a drive out to the Breakaways which are the remains of an ancient mountain range worn down into interesting shapes, colours and formations, and we checked out (a small part of) the Dog Fence that runs 5,400 km across Oz to keep dingos away from livestock. We visited the Old Timers Opal Mine where you can actually see bits of opal in the walls of the mine and a fully furnished underground home - this was pretty cool (no pun intended). We also visited the underground Serbian church which was pretty special and of course I did a tour of the opal shops in town while Blu waited patiently outside (ha ha).
18 May - we left Coober Pedy at midday - onto the gravel road towards Oodnadatta and our first REAL outback experience .......
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anonymous
non-member comment
pukeko
those are pukekos