2006/08 Australia trip - The Coorong |
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Monday August 14th
We saw that we had a message on our satellite phone, but then we lost the signal and couldn’t find out was the message was! Eventually we got through and found that it wasn’t an emergency, but we’d wasted a lot of time and made a late start. It began as a sunny day with a cool wind, but clouded over by lunch time. This was another driving day. We passed Mount Remarkable where we’d camped on our way north. The drive was prettier now with yellow spring flowers lining the road. Forecasts of cold weather for South Australia’s central areas caused us to head for the coast.
It took us a few hours to get to Adelaide. This time we didn’t try to bypass it and we went straight through the middle of the city, reasonably quickly. Adelaide is a flat grid, laid out similarly to American cities, and easy to navigate, but then there’s a steep and winding climb up to Mount Barker on the motorway.
The direct route to Melbourne through the countryside had been very cold on our way out so this time we were going along the coast, a longer route, but more scenic and hopefully a lot warmer. We crossed the Murray River and made it to the coast and the Coorong park at sunset. The Coorong is a thin lagoon, maybe 60 miles long, protected from the Southern Ocean by a barrier of sand. We camped on the Coorong’s shore and although we could hear the sound of surf in the distance, the lagoon was calm and quiet. We had this part of the park and the campground to ourselves.
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Coorong (0.32) |  |
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Tuesday August 15th
We had wet fog overnight and banks of fog drifted around us in the early morning. We went to visit the pelicans at Jack’s Point. Apparently there are sometimes 10000 pelicans there during the breeding season, but we had to make do with a few hundred. The area was ablaze with flowers, mainly yellows and whites, but a few other colours too.