Ceduna

Although nearly 500km east of the Western Australia border, Ceduna is the last decent sized town in South Australia heading west. Although it doesn't have a lot of tourist delights, we spent a couple of days here before heading across the Nullarbor back to WA. The highlight was a visit to the local meteorological office for the daily launch of the weather balloon. Filled with hydrogen, this explodes out of its little store house and rises like a bat out of hell into the air. Apparently it keeps going to about 60,000 feet and stretches to the size of a small room before finally bursting. The met radar keeps track of it all the way, so that punters like us can know what to wear tomorrow. The local meteorologist gave a moderately interesting talk about how the met station works and what his duties are (not much it seems, mostly just making sure the computers that are doing all the work are still going) and we had a look at the other bits and pieces of equipment at the station, ranging from thermometers stuck in the ground, to a rainwater gauge and the evaporation level monitor shown in the photo at right. Some of it mind-blowingly high-tech and others not much more sophisticated than a wet finger stuck in the air!

The other main thing we did here at Ceduna was a visit to the local aboriginal cultural centre where we actually bought a painting. Our relationship to 'culcha' is usually fairly distant, so this was bigger deal for us than perhaps you might assume. Now we just have to keep it undamaged in the van until we once again have a wall to hang it on.

One good thing about Ceduna is the local seafood outlet, we've had meals of fish, prawns and bugs, all local and freshly caught, and John managed to scoff a dozen freshly opened oysters for morning tea.

Wudinna

Wudinna is only 100 km west of Kimba, making it our shortest travel day so far on the trip. This meant that although we only spent 2 nights here, we effectively had almost 2 full days to take in all the sights in the area. Wudinna is in the heart of 'Granite Country', and there are numerous rock outcrops to explore. A scramble to the top of several them rewarded us with panoramic views over the wheat fields of the Eyre Peninsula. The green countryside belies how dry this area really is. Most of the granite outcrops have elaborate rainwater catchment systems, with small walls circling the base of each rock directing any rain that falls into small dams. Most of the systems have fallen into disrepair now that water is piped in to the district, which is a bit sad.

On our second day here we spent the day at the Gawler Ranges National Park, about 50km to the north. While the park has no formal walking trails, we had an enjoyable time exploring the various rock formations and abandoned pastoral buildings. As you can see from the photo at left, they even managed to stretch to a waterfall! The Gawler Ranges are supposedly one of the oldest landscapes on earth and are volcanic in origin, resulting in interesting 'organ pipe' type formations scattered throughout the park, including behind John in this photo. The park itself is fairly undeveloped, and the trails to several of the features gave us some pretty rugged 4wd experiences.

We got back from the Gawler Ranges in time for John to watch the last quarter of the tied AFL Grand Final game, providing more excitement than we've had from any of the natural wonders here!

Port Augusta - Kimba

We spent a day playing golf in Port Augusta, having spent several days here earlier in the trip there wasn't much in the way of tourist delights that we hadn't already done. We then moved on to Kimba, which is in the north of the Eyre Peninsula, and claims to be half way across Australia. Given we were on almost the most easterly point of the continent not much more than a week ago that's quite a bit of travelling we've done fairly quickly.

Kimba services a large grain growing district and is dominated by grain silos. Apart from a visit to the Big Galah, where Wendy bought a couple of pairs of ear-rings as a memento, we found enough to occupy ourselves here for a couple of days. We did quite a bit of walking, firstly on the local town history walk, then to Moseley Nobs, an interesting 3km trail around a series of hummocks providing sweeping views down the Eyre Peninsula, and then 6km through a nature reserve on the edge of town to a good lookout.

On the second day here we drove through the wheat and canola fields of the central Eyre Peninsula. We first visited Carappee Hill, which is the highest point on the Peninsula and the second largest monolith in South Australia. With no marked walking trails we scrambled partway up in the drizzle, but didn't scale the full height. Several lookouts on various local hills and peaks (including the cutely named Ticklebelly Hill), plus an excellent pub lunch in the town of Cleve rounded off a pleasant and scenic day.

Broken Hill

It took us 3 days to get from Yamba, on the NSW north coast, to Broken Hill, in the state's far west. This is the first time we have driven that many days in a row, in fact there's only been a couple of times in the whole trip that we only spent a single night in a place. The first 2 days were fairly tiring driving, as we crossed over several mountain ranges, but the last 750km or so were much flatter and straighter as we started to get into the outback. We decided we needed a good break after this effort, so we have spent a couple of days at Broken Hill recovering.

About two years ago we spent nearly a week in Broken Hill, so we had pretty well already done most of the tourist attractions and walks the town and surrounding region has to offer. But not to despair, the Broken Hill golf course is surprisingly good quality, with well grassed fairways and good greens, so we played golf both days. Other than that we revisited a couple of town lookouts and spent some time browsing through one of the many art galleries here. Unlike some other mining towns, Broken Hill is keenly aware that eventually the mine will close, and they are trying very hard to ensure the local economy has other planks. Pro Hart and some of his contemporaries became famous in Australia in the 1960s for their naive style of outback art, and now Broken Hill is home to an enormous number of artists of all styles and types. At first glance it seems an unlikely match with the town's outback mining town image, but it is a mix that seems to work and certainly draws in a lot of tourists.

The recent heavy rain that has drenched southern and central Australia has really brightened up the region, we were stunned by the colourful displays of wildflowers on the road here, carpets of flowers where you would normally expect to see only dry scrub.

A Visitor in Yamba

On our last weekend in Yamba we had a visitor come to stay for a few days - John's son Daniel drove up from Sydney. We don't really have room in the van for a third person, so he stayed in a cabin in the same caravan park. He's a keen golfer (and a good one too - handicap 2) so on Saturday we played in the daily comp at Maclean. None of us did very well, I think the narrow fairways didn't help, but once again the locals were extremely friendly and we had a lovely day. On Sunday John and Daniel played at Yamba, and once again failed to feature in the prize pool. We had a terrific weekend with Daniel, and it was lovely to see family again. We really appreciated him making the trip, 700km is quite a drive on your own.

Outside of Daniel's visit, the rest of our time in Yamba since our last posting has been fairly quiet. We've journeyed around the region playing golf at Grafton, Ballina and Iluka, and had another bushwalk in the Yuraygir National Park. In the photo here John is next to an Aboriginal fish trap. At high tide the pool would be underwater, then when the water receded any large fish would be trapped, allowing them to be speared easily. We also did the 2 history walks on offer here in town.

In most towns, the caravan park tends to be on the edge of town, and you can't get anywhere except by driving. The caravan park here is right in the middle of the action - walk out the front gate and you are in the main shopping/cafe strip, out the side gate and you are 1 block from the bowling club and 2 blocks from the golf course, and the river runs all the way along the back of the park. We've taken advantage of the proximity to lots of eateries to go out several times for dinner, we even found a pizza/pasta joint that does gluten free, so John has been able to take advantage of the entire range of cuisines on offer.

White Legs Gleaming in the Sun

We're spending some time in Yamba, on the north coast of NSW. Yamba started life as a fishing village, but the fishermen now rub shoulders with tourists, who come here to bask in the 'second best climate in the world', behind only San Diego according to the CSIRO. We have no idea what the criteria were, but presumably lots of sunshine would have rated pretty highly. We've finally got our shorts out of the cupboard after what felt like an endless southern winter, and our pasty white legs are soaking up the sun's rays.

Our first priority when we arrived was to check out the golf course and we were quite pleased with what we found. We've already had 4 games each, plus a further game at Maclean not far down the road. The members have all been very welcoming, and the course fairly challenging and in good condition. In the week and a half before we leave here we plan to play several more times at Yamba, plus at some of the other courses up and down the coast.

Our time here hasn't been spent entirely playing golf, we've also done quite a few touristy things. Yamba is on the southern shore at the mouth of the Clarence River, with sister town Iluka on the northern shore. A few days ago we caught the ferry to Iluka and did a nice walk through the World Heritage listed Iluka Nature Reserve, culminating in some spectacular views at Iluka Bluff lookout, back over the forest and river as well as along the coast. We made our way back along roads to the town centre (a rather grand name for the couple of shops available) and after a much better than expected lunch at the local chippy (Wendy had an excellent home made seafood chowder and John some very tasty grilled fish with chips and salad) we caught the afternoon ferry back to Yamba. It was a very satisfying day out.

The following day we headed south down the coast a bit, to the Yuraygir National Park, and did some more walking, through coastal woodland and scrub, then back along one of the magnificent beaches in the park. The photo at left would probably be recognised by many as the round balls of sand produced by crabs when they dig their burrows in the sand. These are below the high water line so they must do them twice a day after each high tide. We tried to produce similar balls ourselves but all we could get was a handful of grains, they must have some crabby secret to get such perfect orbs.

Having got the taste for walking we headed north today to Bundalung National Park and spent a leisurely hour strolling through the forest by the Evans River.

It isn't all exercise for us here at Yamba, we've also been supporting the local fishing industry. As well as several meals of fresh local fish, we've also had a couple of meals of prawns - at $10 a kilo from the local prawn farm how could you go wrong!