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.

Across the Nullarbor Plain

Any classicists out there will know that the name Nullarbor derives from the Latin for "treeless", but in fact most of the 1200 km trip between Norseman in WA and Ceduna in SA is through scrub and bush, with only a relatively small distance on the flat, treeless limestone slab that gives the journey its name and reputation. It would have been a difficult trip before the highway was sealed in 1976, nowadays the Eyre Highway is a superb road and the drive is not nearly as adventurous. However, you still need to be aware that there are few services and little water, and ensure that vehicle and equipment are in shape.

We had an early start from Norseman to travel the 700km to Eucla, just west of the SA border. Eucla is a tiny town, which still makes it bigger than all the other places on the WA part of the Eyre Highway, which are just roadhouses. Eucla has its own timezone, half way between WA time and SA time (although it doesn't do daylight saving) so we lost 45 minutes. We decided to give ourselves a rest at Eucla and stay 2 nights, rather than making it the overnight stop that most travellers do. The town started life as a telegraph station, when the line was built across the continent from East to West in 1877 and today houses people working at the local meteorological station and the quarantine post at the state border, plus having a police station and medical centre. However, it has been moved to the top of the escarpment which overlooks the old town site, which has been overrun with sand dunes. It is amazing how many towns we have seen on this trip that are no longer at their original sites, you think of a town as being fixed and immovable, but in fact they are sometimes surprisingly perambulant. We also planned to visit the met station, as they are open to visitors, but when we fronted up there was a sign on the door saying that they were closed that day, which we found disappointing.

Fully rested, the next day we tackled the last 500km of the trip to Ceduna. Once again we got away to an early start, as with daylight saving we knew we would lose 1 3/4 hours to the time difference. There are some terrific vistas from the limestone cliffs, looking across the waters of the Great Australian Bight, but we are here at the wrong time of year to see any whales, which apparently are a common sight in Winter and Spring. The final part of the road into Ceduna is quite a contrast to most of the journey, as it passes through vast grain fields and farmlands. South Australia has a quarantine point just outside of Ceduna, where they take any fresh fruit or veg, we had heard about this and planned our supplies from Norseman so we finished the last things at our lunch stop before we got to Ceduna.

Some people may be aware that late last year a new 'golf course' was opened across the Nullarbor, called Nullarbor Links(www.nullarborlinks.com). Billed as 'the longest golf course in the world', it consists of one or two holes at each of various stops along the road, starting with 2 holes at Kalgoorlie and ending with 2 at Ceduna. The holes themselves consist generally of artificially turfed tees and greens, with scrub, dirt or sheep paddock in between. We briefly considered playing the course on our trip across, but decided that we didn't really want to spend the time stopping at each of the roadhouses or stations along the way. We did have a look at the hole at Eucla while we were there, which didn't make us regret our decision!

Norseman

Norseman is a gold mining town about halfway between Esperance and Kalgoorlie, and is the western end of the Eyre Highway across the Nullarbor. We've spent a couple of nights here, although we haven't seen it at its best as it has been in the 40s both days. The town was named after the horse that, supposedly, got a gold nugget stuck in his foot when a stockman camped nearby overnight, thus sparking the local rush in the 1890's. While its glory days are long gone, Norseman is a neat town with some nice parks and civic institutions, and they have gone to a fair bit of trouble to try and entice the tourists who stop off after their Nullarbor crossing to stay for more than a single night. We did several short walks through the local woodlands near town, each

providing lookouts over salt lakes, mine sites and the distant ranges, as well as good information boards on the flora and fauna (who'd have thought there could be so many different kinds of trees that all look pretty much the same). We also did a very interesting heritage drive winding past old gold workings and the traces of previous boom towns. Seeing how little is left of once bustling communities makes you wonder how long we can continue to ride the current mining boom in Australia, and what will happen when all those minerals too start to run out.

We would have liked to spend a bit more time exploring local rock formations, but the heat drove us inside to huddle in our air conditioned van watching the Australian Open tennis.