Southern Ocean Drive

That’s the more humble name for the South Australian coastal highway.

We waved a fond farewell to Peter, Karen and the farm and drove on to Victor Harbor. We had to take a picture of this giant lobster, it’s a cafe and is for sale!

At our first stop we found this intriguing monument

It was to the first casualties on Australian soil in WWII when a mine washed up onto the shore. The bomb squad ran wires from the mine to a safe distance but unfortunately this was over the railway line. Before they could detonate it a train came along and cut the wires. While the lads were re-wiring the mine a wave knocked it over & it blew up killing the poor men.

We then stopped at Robe and admired its pretty bay and white sandy beach.

There’s a memorial here to the historic and unexpected meeting of British Flinders of the ‘Investigator’ and French Baudin of the ‘Geographie’ in 1802. They got on well as both were scientific explorers and Flinders shared information on clean water and named the bay Encounter Bay in honour of this meeting.

Later in 1803 Flinders popped in at Mauritius for repairs – and although he knew the British were now at war with France he thought the scientific status of his voyage would protect him. And I rather think his good experience with the decent Baudin put him off-guard. Anyway they threw him into prison & he was stuck there for 6 years writing up his discoveries.

Matthew Flinders is widely attributed as the first to give the name Australia specifically to this continent rather than the more general Southern area it was previously applied to.

There is also a Chinese gate in the sea to honour the 16,500 Chinese who came to Robe in 1856-8 and walked 200 miles to the Victoria gold fields in the gold rush!

We then drove up the Coorong National Park. This is a long curving stretch of coast where there’s the ocean, long dunes, long salty lakes of various colours and basically masses of pelicans. Here’s another pink lake,

And a white one,

We stopped for our picnic opposite Pelican island where they breed. We couldn’t see the nests, just lots of white adults, but above us we watched the wheeling giants gaining height in the thermals.

They eat 5kg of fish a day (yes those of you who have followed this blog from the start will spot my previous error!) and they are known to eat the young of other pelicans on unguarded nests – nice.

Driving the dirt roads in the Coorong we spotted a feisty blue tongued lizard

Further west we reached more lakes and enjoyed our own personal ferry!

No charge. And a second one we had to share

We stopped over at Victor Harbor where they have a very healthy bowls scene and we walked to Granite Island in the morning across the causeway.

We could have gone on the horse pulled tram – it is the last survivor of the trams that used to pull wool and grain to the ships waiting on the causeway.

I felt sorry for the horse pulling such a big looking load, but when I saw him set off from standing he hardly pulled at all and it was so flat the driver was mostly keeping the brake on! He was a beautiful horse and there was another in case he got bored.

Granite island is full of granite boulders!

We then drove to the ferry and now we are on kangaroo island

Bring on the kangaroos!