South Australia

Hi everyone!
We are in South Australia and have certainly been enjoying ourselves! Not entirely free from wet, cold, windy weather, but enough sunshine to just keep us smiling!

Our week in Adelaide was great! The caravan park was right on the river about 7km from the city centre. Adelaide has such a great bike path network that we enjoyed lots of riding, and found it a city full of cyclists! We were also really impressed with their dedicated bus highway! The buses rush along on a raised concrete platform, almost like a toboggan! They are guided by small wheels that stick out sideways and stop the bus hitting the concrete sides. The buses glide along so quietly at speeds around 80 km per hour!

After getting a feel for the main Rundell Mall shops, buskers and public art – gotta love the Mall’s Balls! We headed out to the Barossa Valley for the day, starting at the wonderful Barossa Valley Farmers Markets. Yes! We are suckers for the local farmers markets! But this is where Maggie Beer shops! We bought Kasundi, green tea, sourdough, an exquisitely decorated cupcake (tribute to you Bec!), and fresh fruit and vegetables including purple carrots! They tasted exactly like normal carrots, but were rich and juicy with the colouring of beetroot; great dose of antioxidants! After the markets we explored a number of wonderful antique shops scattered through the beautiful historic towns. Then it was on to Maggie Beer’s farm for lunch! Everything on display was available for free tastings and although we bought some vino cotto, pheasant pate, a signed cookbook and some gourmet ice cream, we didn’t end up having lunch there. But we still enjoyed the beautiful views around her pheasant farm. So lunch was in another historic town called Tanunda, were we found a beautiful pub and enjoyed the local Cooper’s Beer on tap with a yummy pub meal! And that would be our Barossa experience!....What! you say, no wineries? Now, I don’t deny that we enjoy a nice wine, but it seems like such a waste to sip and spit (Stuart was driving)! And to be honest, we had a great experience without it – the Barossa had so much more to offer than wine, and we could have easily stayed longer.

Our other exciting spoil was tickets to the WOMadelaide world music festival! It was held in the Adelaide Botanic Gardens over 4 days, but we just attended the Sunday night. The festival had such a beautiful friendly crowd. We took advantage of the large secure bicycle park they offered and rode to and from the festival. We saw music such as a Spanish guitar trio, and Inuit throat singer from Canada, heaps of funky beats from African and South America, Calypso Rose from Trinidad – a woman so full of love, life and laughter! And of course the headlining act Afro-Celt Sound System an unusual blend of singing and instruments but so funky I couldn’t stop dancing! It was great to be at a festival with such a variety of people of all ages, and when it ended I loved that hundreds of people rode their bikes home from the city centre near midnight!

I really enjoyed Adelaide. It seemed to have a strong community feel, with regular festivals and celebrations, a busy art scene and plenty of ‘green city’ initiatives in action! With so many parks and gardens throughout the city, it had a spacious and relaxed feel to it! I definitely plan to return for more!
After Adelaide we tried to enjoy the York Peninsula, and although we found a beautiful coastal camp in Innes National Park, walking distance from a beautiful fishing beach complete with a boat wreck, but the wind was howling and quite frankly, we have had our fill of rough weather camping! So we left a day later, heading inland for Mt Remarkable National Park which is in the southern Flinders Ranges. We found a beautiful scenic (and sheltered!) woodland where we enjoyed warm weather, and some bushwalking. We even had a flock of emus walk right into camp!

We next arrived in the Flinders Ranges National Park and the area has easily made it to my short-list of favourite places in Australia! (I think I just love the Outback, no matter which state it belongs to). We are back to red dirt and rocky gorges with steep rugged cliff faces. We first made camp in the northern section of the park and explored the Aroona ruins and other outstations which artist Hans Heyson resided at while painting his many famous images of the Flinders. As we drove through the Branchina Gorge we stopped to see a group of Yellow-Footed Rock Wallabys! These little fella’s are stunning with bands of colour that blend in with their habitat. After a day marvelling at the beauty of the Flinders Ranges we decided to set up camp in the southern section next to the geological wonder, Wilpena Pound. The ‘Pound’ is a huge mountain ridge in a circular shape, similar to a gigantic meteorite crater, but it was shaped by natural movements of the earth’s crust. Our views of the Pound were somewhat delayed as the weather wasn’t good for climbing to any of the lookouts for a few days, but we finally made it to the top of Mount Ohlssen Bagge and were rewarded with a stunning 360 degree view of the Pound and surrounding area!

Unfortunately, the weather was still pretty wet. We had the internet available at the pound campsite, so Stuart checked the weather forcasts and instead of sitting around waiting for some blue sky to reach us (which is a pretty miserable thing to do in the camper, not to mention there was also a mouse plague!! Let’s just say I slept in the car!) we decided to make an overnight trek to the town of Marree on the faint hope of jagging a window of fine weather to take a charter flight over Lake Eyre!! Given all of the wet weather, there were road closures all over the place, but we found a couple of roads through the park back out to the bitumen. Stuart had to really concentrate on driving, as the dirt roads were really muddy and slippery! When we arrived at Marree, it was still overcast and windy!

Sunrise in Marree - all aboard!

Thankfully, we woke to a beautiful sunrise and blue skies as we climbed into our little plane! Our pilot Katrina, was only 21 but had flying since she was 14 and had previously worked in Tasmania flying tourists over Wineglass Bay. Our flight headed east following the Birdsville Track to Cooper Creek, a source of freshwater that runs into Lake Eyre. Here we saw huge flocks of Pelicans and other birds that had flown in to enjoy the high water levels. Cooper Creek last flowed into Lake Eyre in 1990 and it only happens about 8 out of 100 years! It was now also supporting a good stock of fish too! After this we flew across the rather green sand dunes of the Tirari Desert spotting cattle on the stations below before reaching our first glimpse of Lake Eyre! The bay that we first flew over was just a small fraction of the lake’s size and already the water stretched further than the horizon. The depth of water in this bay was only 30cm deep and was a brilliant pink colour which reflected off the clouds and the bottom of the plane! I was totally in awe and never expected it to be so beautiful! The pink colouring is said to be from an algae which thrives in the water which is 10 times saltier than the ocean. Out in the middle of the lake there is a fuselage of a plane that crashed when the pilots tried to fly lower than sea level! Lake Eyre is just below sea level, but not low enough to allow a plane to fly, hence the crash!

Our next leg was over the deeper Jackboot Bay and a deep blue colour. We then flew over Lake Eyre South and could see the wind blowing the water around on the shallow banks. We were told that the wind can shift the water on the shallow margins of the lake by up to 5kms. The sights back to Marree were full of dense green bands of vegetation on the banks of the water courses. The flight was yet another highlight of our holiday!

The road trip between Marree and Wilpena Pound was also a great one. We stopped at the Praire Hotel in Parachilna for lunch. A renowned outback hotel with great food, art, style and their own brewed beer - Farger Larger! It has apparently hosted a number of Hollywood celebrities during the filming of movies in the area.

Other side trips included exploring the ruins of the abandoned town of Farina, stopping for a delicious sweet quandong pie and viewing the spectacular Ochre cliffs exposing an array of colours which local aboriginal tribes have traded with distant tribes for stone tools and other necessities.

We have since checked the weather maps (surprise, surprise) and the coastal areas all along the Eyre Peninsula are blowing a gale! So we have hit the road heading west, where hopefully we will get some calmer conditions at Streaky Bay on the western end of the peninsular before we hit the Nullabour.

So it’s not too long now!

Take care everyone,

Mish and Stu