Travels Suspended

Our travels are suspended for the moment, as we have returned to Melbourne due to a problem in Wendy's family. We probably won't be on the road again for another month or two, so check us out again then.

Whyalla

Whyalla is the second largest city in South Australia, after the capital Adelaide. It is massively industrial, with a huge steelworks and a separate LPG fractionation plant. We had hoped to do a tour of the steelworks, but for some reason they have been suspended for the last couple of years. We are only 2 weeks too early, as they are starting again on the 15th Feb. There is a fine layer of red dust over the whole town, from the iron ore stockpiles at the steelworks, although there is also a surprising amount of grass in the town's parks and gardens, plus quite a good golf course (which we, of course, had a game on).

Whyalla sits on the western shore of the Spencer Gulf, and, like Port Lincoln, it has quite an active aquaculture industry. In Whyalla's case they raise kingfish in huge pens in the gulf just

north of town. One of the local high schools has set up their own small aquaculture operation, to provide training to help equip students for future employment in the industry and we went on a tour of this operation. As seems to happen frequently, we were the only people on the tour, and the teacher showed us over the tanks holding the various sized barramundi and talked about what the students did. There were also a couple of tanks full of yabbies, apparently they started with one breeding pair and, like rabbits, now have yabbies galore. Apparently the really small ones get sucked into the water filter and turn up unexpectedly in the other tanks, so now the whole place has yabbies. It was quite an interesting way to spend an hour, for $10 a head how could you go wrong?

The caravan park is on the foreshore of the Spencer Gulf, and when we arrived it was low tide. The shores of the gulf in this area are incredibly shallow, and you could see people still only knee deep 400 metres offshore, fishing for crabs. It is obviously a generally successful pursuit, because there were dozens of them wading around (people, not crabs). I wonder how often people misjudge the incoming tide and have to swim back to shore?

About 30km north of town there is a conservation park, conserving 'a good example of the native flora and fauna of this semi-arid area'. We did an interesting short walk up the only hill in the park, and even got to glimpse some of the native fauna as a couple of rock wallabies bounded out of our path. We also did a scenic drive up the shores of the Spencer Gulf, which was made more interesting by the provision of information boards giving an insight into the landscape and natural and man-made history. All in all, we've happily filled in an enjoyable couple of days in a town noted more for its heavy industry than its tourism potential.

Port Lincoln

Port Lincoln is a fishing town and grain port at the southern end of the Eyre Peninsula, west of Adelaide. For the last few years its main industry has been tuna farming. The boats head out in Jan/Feb and capture wild tuna, bringing them back in to 'farms' set up offshore from town. They fatten them for 6 months or so then sell them to Japan for sashimi. In good years they get up to $4,000 per fish, at the moment with the ongoing financial downturn they are getting 'only' around $1,000 per fish. The quotas have been dropped, but this year they will still be fattening up around 75,000 fish, do the maths and you can see why the town looks pretty prosperous! As well as tuna they also fish for prawns, crab, rock lobsters, abalone and various scale fish. Almost everything caught is sent overseas, with only a small amount of (often substandard) catch making its way onto Australian plates. There are two seafood outlets in town, and we have made the most of them, feasting on prawns, scallops and fish while we have been here.

In common with most towns, Port Lincoln makes a tourist attraction of its main industries. We did a half day tour to a tuna farm, which had in fact been set up as a tourist attraction, the fish at the 'farm' had been there several years, escaping the fate of their less fortunate Japan bound cousins. You could feed the tuna by hand, which was a scarier proposition than it sounds. Tuna don't jump, so you had to dangle the pilchard into the water, then all of a sudden one of these massive fish would appear from underneath the platform (they can apparently see the target better coming from the dark into the light) and grab the pilchard out of your hand. We quickly took up the offer of using a pair of long tongs to hold the food fish with, you could get a nasty scrape from the rough skin of the tuna. It was a fairly cool day so we didn't take up the offer of going for a swim with the tuna, besides it sounded a slightly scary proposition being surrounded by such large creatures in their element. Instead we spent some time watching the fish through the underwater glass viewing area provided. Rounding the tour off was a taste of the end product, the thinly sliced sashimi was surprisingly tasty, although by this stage Wendy was starting to feel a little queasy on the floating farm platform, and we were both glad to get back to shore.

On another day we did a walking tour of the marina area, we were the only ones on the tour. The guide's main job was as captain of one of the prawning boats. This was his first time taking the tour, I'm not sure what the tour usually does, but we spent most of the time exploring the prawn trawler. They spend 2 weeks at a time in the Spencer Gulf, the boat was much more luxurious than our caravan and immaculately clean. The bridge was a techy's paradise, with more screens, dials, buttons and knobs than you would expect on the space shuttle. The prawns are snap frozen down to -40 within 40 minutes of being caught. Once again the tour concluded with a tasting of the local product, this time some cooked prawns and sashimi kingfish and abalone.

It wasn't all gourmet delights at Port Lincoln (should we mention the couple of wineries we

visited?), we also spent some time walking in nearby national parks. Lincoln NP is on the very southern tip of the Eyre Peninsula, with a further area of land set aside just west of it, a privately run reserve called Whaler's Way. The whalers are long gone, but the wild coastline remains. We spent a half day doing the scenic drive around Whaler's Way, then another day walking in Lincoln NP.

Around 50 km west of Port Lincoln is Coffin Bay. Many people may recognise the name - Coffin Bay oysters are famous in Australia. There is a National Park on the peninsula just south of Coffin Bay, and we had another interesting walk there. We couldn't leave without checking out the local product, a task that proved harder than you might imagine. Oyster wholesaler after oyster wholesaler told us they had no product for sale, until finally we tracked down one place who agreed to sell us the last 16 shellfish they had pulled from the water that morning (for the princely sum of $8 - you'd be lucky to get them in the local pub at $12 a half dozen). Oysters are something you either love or hate - John loves them and Wendy hates them. Fresh oysters such as these are still alive and closed, waiting to be devoured, but you have to be able to get into them. The man at the wholesalers gave John a demonstration ( leaving 15 to come home and one already eaten) and when we got home John set to work. Like many things oyster shucking is something that comes better with practice, luckily 15 oysters were enough to give John plenty of practice, and by the time he was replete he was getting quite good at it.