Tag: South Australia

A taste of South Australia

Port Lincoln sunrise
Port Lincoln sunrise

Having finished the golfing activities, we headed down the Eyre Peninsula exploring some of the South Australian coastline along the way. I would love to return at some stage with more time, as there were plenty of places worthy of further exploration and better light for photography. The granite inselbergs at Murphy’s Haystacks, for example, really need some Golden Hour light to do them justice.

Murphy’s haystacks
Port Kenny fishing boat

Basing ourselves in Port Lincoln for a couple of nights, we enjoyed a lovely day exploring Coffin Bay National Park, and sampling some of the local seafood.

Coffin Bay National Park
Pacific gulls nesting
Ocean view from Coffin Bay NP
Teddy in his swag at Port Lincoln

A visit to South Australia has to include some wineries – a long drive north to Port Augusta and then south again found us in the Clare Valley, one of the premium wine regions of Australia. By this time, the heat wave we left behind in Perth had caught up – temperatures around 40 deg C tend to slow activity down – but we did manage to visit a few estates. We then relaxed a bit in Hahndorf, an attractive town in the Adelaide Hills with a very strong German influence (yummy beer and sausages).

Clare Valley wine estate
German-style beer
Hahndorf cafe

Plans for the next stage had to be abandoned due to the extreme temperatures (all the national parks in South Australia, northern Victoria and western New South Wales were closed) so we decided to head for the Snowy Mountains as quickly as possible – at least we had air-con in the vehicles during the day. South Australia is definitely on the ‘revisit’ list.

Noisy miner
South Australia border – Murray River
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The heart of the Nullarbor

Sunset on the Nullarbor
Sunset on the Nullarbor

The Nullarbor is most definitely well-named, from the Latin words Nullus arbor, meaning No trees. The seemingly endless flat plain covers an area about the size of the State of Victoria. Once a shallow sea-bed, the Nullarbor is the world’s largest karst landform. South of the Nullarbor is the Great Australian Bight, essentially a very large bay with steep cliff faces. We stopped briefly at a couple of the viewing platforms – with me cursing that the light was in the wrong place for landscape photography – and made it to the Nullarbor Motel just before sunset. Not long before reaching the motel, David and I saw a dingo on the side of the road, and then discovered that the golf hole at the motel was called the Dingo’s Den. Interrupting dinner to take some photos of the sunset, I got another glimpse of a dingo – of course, I had my very wide angle lens one so the dingo is a speck in the distance. He is on the edge of the Royal Flying Doctor Service airstrip; the RFDS is a lifesaver for residents and travelers in the Australian Outback.

Flying Doctor airstrip with dingo
The Great Australian Bight
Nullarbor scrub
Typical Aussie road signs

Next morning saw the beginning of the last golfing day, with some fun hunting balls around the Dingo’s Den. This was followed by some very hot and dusty holes in places with odd names (Nundroo and Penong). Finally we made it to the golf course in Ceduna for the last two holes! A visit to the Visitor Centre to get the cards signed off (and to David’s relief, to hear that there were much worse scores on record) was followed by a well-deserved 19th hole in the air-conditioned comfort of a Ceduna pub.

Handshake at the final hole in Ceduna
Maybe the dingo has the ball
Hot and bothered
Dusty in Penong
Dry, dusty and up a hill