After a few weeks in the desert and a couple of great days in Adelaide it was time to hit the road again and head back to the coast. It is quite a long drive – especially the route I have chosen, so after walking round to collect the car and loading everything into it we hit the road. The first part of the journey took us down to a peninsular where our first stop was a drive up to the lookout at the top of the Myponga Reservoir which was quite impressive you are quite high up and are looking over the sluice gates which would definitely fill the valley below with water if they were opened. We had a look round then drove over the dam wall and continued on to Ingalalla Falls. This was a short walk from the car park and there was actually some water coming over the top of the falls unlike a number of the others we have seen recently. It was nice to stretch our legs even though it was only a short walk. After this we headed back towards the sea and drove around the coast and through Victor Harbour which has a causeway connecting the mainland to Granite island. We didn’t stop but apparently we could have taken a horse and carriage, a double decker tram or walked over to the island. We didn’t see either the tram or any horses so I think it might be the wrong time of year. The drive along the coast was really nice and we pulled in at a picnic area at port Elliot which is somewhere that in season you can actually watch whales from the shore but although they had a viewing deck and a picnic table you couldn’t actually see the sea from there so we decided to continue. This was actually a bit of a mistake as we didn’t really come across another good picnic spot as we were heading in land again. We took the ‘short cut’ which meant we didn’t have to drive all the way up to to Murray Bridge which is actually only about an hour outside Adelaide but I had forgotten that this route involved a ferry so after a quick check of the internet we confirmed that it was running and continued towards Wellington to the chain ferry. It is a very slick operation a free service that runs 24 hours a day 365 days of the year and there is a sign that says ‘if no one around please ring the bell’ as we arrived in the middle of the day it was working fine so we took our turn and headed over the other side of the river. After a while we were back on the coast road and we stopped for a stretch in a really nice town called Meningie which may or may not have been on the coast, the reason for the confusion is that there is a massive sand bar that runs along this coast line and there used to be a number of freshwater lakes in the area so I am not sure if this was one of those or actually the sea! All the same it was a nice coastal town and a good place to have a bit of a break then it was back in the car for the final couple of hours of the journey. We had stopped earlier by something that was called the ‘pink lake’ as this whole area has a number of salt flats and carotene (the same stuff that makes flamingo’s pink) grows in the water to protect the earth, however, the pink lake just looked like a salt flat to me so we carried on driving, the other side of Meningie however there was definitely a pink lake, it was a salt lake as the edges were crusted with salt but there was water in it and that was definitely a bright pink. All of this area is part of the Coorong National Park and most of it is classed as wetlands – at least this time there is some water on the wetland! Further on rather than the really nice pink lake the massive waterway on the other side of the road was a dirty green / brown colour, the scenery was actually quite nice but the water looked really dirty. We decided that it was quite shallow and this was a reflection of the algae that was growing on the bottom. Finally as we were driving along we saw some wild Emu in a field just munching away so after watching them for a while we finished our journey and arrived at our accommodation in Robe. This is the first house that was built in the area after Robe became a township in 1846 and we have a studio apartment which is really nice and furnished in keeping with the time the building was first occupied it even had a real fire although the temperature has been 30C today so we wont need to light it, all the same after just over eight hours on the road it was nice to collapse in a comfortable chair with a beer before having something to eat and heading for bed!
