2015/11 Australia trip - Coorong |
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Wednesday November 18th
It was warm overcast and dead calm for our ferry trip back to mainland. We followed the very bumpy coast road around to Victor Harbour. Many of the roads in South Australia seem to have highly variable camber; bouncing us all over the place and making any bend a challenge.
Our Garmin showed us continuing along the coast from there, even though it includes the mouth of the Murray River. The river actually flows into freshwater Lake Alexandrina which empties into the sea. We think the Garmin was treating the barrages that keep the sea water out of the lake as roads.
In reality we had to skirt the massive lake and make our way to Wellington where there’s a ferry across the river. On a hot and humid afternoon we stopped for lunch at Clayton Bay, a little town almost surrounded by the lake. This pelican looked happy. Ibis don’t laugh.
The chain ferry at Wellington was free and efficient. We were now on the Princes Highway, the main road from Adelaide to the south coast, faster but more traffic.
We were going to camp in the Coorong, a hundred miles of lagoons and sand dunes. The sand dunes take the brunt of the ocean’s waves, protecting the shallow lagoons, home to thousands of pelicans and seabirds. There are many turnings into the Coorong and by luck we found one that led to Parnka Point and a couple of campgrounds. “All sites must now be booked and paid for online” the sign said. OK so what about those of us with prepaid passes? We were supposed to use “unnumbered sites” to avoid conflicts with those booking online. If there’s no number how do you know if it’s a site? In the end we just picked the best spot overlooking the lagoon that we could find, and prepared to argue. As is 
usually the case no one disturbed us.
It must have been the wrong season as birdlife was sparse, just a few pelicans and ducks. But it’s a wild and unusual landscape, good for a day or two. We had a warm and windy evening with rain sweeping in at bed time.