Just Keep on travelling: The southern coastline of South Australia

Thursday, March 8, 2012

The southern coastline of South Australia

Austrian tourists - the givers of peanut butter

After a pleasant evening at Minnipa, Peter had a number of business calls to make so I went for a walk to have a look around. The town has only two shops that are open – the community general store and a second hand book store. I spoke to the lady at the book store who said that there are about 150 people living in Minnipa who are mainly retired. Any children in the area need to travel by bus to the area school about 25 kms away.

Just to show how much peanut butter the
Austrian couple had sampled

Once the calls were completed we packed up to head towards Streaky Bay. Just as we were leaving we were approached by a young couple who were camping near us. They were a young Austrian couple who had shipped their 4wd camper to Australia for their four month holiday in the outback. They had bought a jar of peanut butter, which was completely new to them, and after trying it decided they didn’t like it and offered it to us. They were an interesting couple to meet and we couldn't encourage them to try the peanut butter again as they had taken the very smallest amount from the jar. They were heading to Broken Hill so Peter encouraged them to visit the Silverton Hotel and become life members obviously not telling them the consequence of that was. He has good memories of his visit in mid 2011 with a group of friends.

The road leading into Streaky Bay, SA

We made our way to Streaky Bay which is a very popular holiday spot and known for seafood. It is a pretty seaside village with a long jetty where a number of locals or visitors were fishing and putting down crab nets. The best we could do was stop at one of the fish shops and buy some lovely fresh fish for a few meals!

The jetty at Streaky Bay, SA

Our stop over for the night was at Haslam Caravan Park which is also on the coast. This is a community camping facility with limited facilities and there were possibly more campers overnight than locals. Again there is the jetty and from here we watched one of the local fishing boats being launched – taken out by a tractor to where the water changes colour and there is sufficient depth. It was interesting to see the tractor driver take the tractor back up to the sand then have to walk out the long distance back to the boat. Hopefully he was wearing waterproof overalls or he would have been very wet.

Streaky Bay township from the jetty

We had initially planned on staying a couple of nights but this morning Peter noticed that the birds had been working overtime and the front of the caravan was in a real mess. We decided it was time to give it a wash and move on. We didn’t travel far before we pulled off the Eyre Highway into Smoky Bay. This bay is very pretty with a sandy beach and good facilities along the beach front. We stopped a while but as we had only travelled a very short distance continued on. We took another side road to look at the Conservation Park areas and had lunch at Wittelbee Conservation Park. We would have enjoyed having this area to ourselves to camp but as it is a national park a permit is required. These must be purchased on line and at a minimum of $50 for two months was not worth our while for one night. It is a shame there is not a nightly fee.

The Viterra grain silos, Streaky Bay

A few further kilometres of dirt road took us to Ceduna Waters which is a reasonably new subdivision but right on the coast. We made our way down to the water edge and have set up camp at the end of a track and we have the beach area to ourselves. It is so lovely and peaceful and the only visitor we have had is one dirt bike rider – let’s hope he or his mates don’t visit again later tonight.