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| Post 8 - Tour De Fleur - Photos |
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Post 8 - Greetings from the Fleurieu Peninsula, SA - Journal
Greetings from the Fleurieu Peninsula, SA!
So, the Fleurieu Peninsula was a rather interesting mixed-bag part of South Australia and a rather mixed-bag kind of tour for us too. I guess that being a Peninsula you might be forgiven for thinking that we would have indulged in a fair bit of swimming, given the vast stretches of empty, golden sandy beaches that came one after the other. Yes, when the weather was good the water was beautifully blue but, truth be told, a lot of the time the weather didn’t play ball, (again! Bloody Southern Ocean – give me the warm and more dependable Indian Ocean in W.A any day!)…in fact when it was nice weather, we were just passing through and when we did have time to swim it was never great weather! Jeez! Also, most of the beaches weren’t our kind of beaches really (we are more “secluded cove/clifftop” people!) and the “cliff-tops” were a bit of an exaggeration on the part of the tourist brochures, given that they mostly weren’t that high or that rugged!. Perhaps the only Peninsula beach that truly stood out for us was the pretty 3km one at Maslin – which also happened to be Australia’s first nudist beach. We think we spotted a nudist bather laying prone to the world quite a way down the beach but sadly we just couldn’t be sure and, rather disappointingly, the rest of the beach was empty! It still gets top marks from us though for also being the only beach in South Australia to hold the Nude Olympics every Australia Day (3 legged races and coit-tossing eat your heart out LOL!). And of course there was our rather wonderful evening sitting atop those same Maslin “cliffs” in the wonderfully still and warm air - just the two of us, drinking some rather delicious sparkling Shiraz whilst watching the sun set, the moon rise and the stars come out to play. But I digress. When all’s said and done, we did finally manage to get our fill of rugged spectacular coastal scenery in the end, via Deep Creek Conservation Park and so this blog shall simply recount how we did the “tour-de-Fleur” in true “Flash and Caz” stylie – by going bush, introducing planes and some flying, and taking time to linger at superb wineries, a rather stunning Farmers Market, a bakery or two and a fantastic little micro-brewery. We hope you enjoy our journey as much as we did!!
So, this little piggy went to market………
Wow what a find at the top end of the Fleurieu Peninsula! Willunga Farmers Market was the first ever in South Australia and nowadays, with apparently at least 1,000 people lingering here every Saturday morning from 7a.m, it’s also recognized as one of the absolute best farmers markets in the whole of Australia too! On a cosy site in the historic town centre, Gordon and I had a chance to have our eyes boggle and pop out at the fantastic showcase of fresh, seasonal and regional produce from the 50+ stalls housing orchardists, biodynamic livestock producers and cheesemakers, vegetable growers, dairy farmers, baker, cooks, and viticulturilists! Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson would have loved to have joined us in our little bit of heaven – especially since this market has strict criteria that encourages only local seasonal produce, primary producers and sustainable production methods….nice one!
The whole point of the market is of course to sample, talk to the producers/growers and ask questions etc, as well as buy, buy, buy! There’s nothing more satisfying that hearing that the pesto you have in your hand was made literally the night before for this market day, or talking to the farmer of the locally produced biodynamic meats on his stand and understanding why they are so good for you - not to mention listening to little anecdotal stories from suppliers as to how a certain popular line came into being (i.e. the accidental discovery of “coffee almonds” when a label-maker stuffed up on the printing of what should have been “toffee almonds”. Not wanting to waste the labels, an experiment was launched that now results in big profits!).
I would love to say that the market was a casual and relaxed affair and in truth, I suppose once you have done your shopping, it can be – but you unless you have been to one of these affairs you can’t begin to imagine the near frenzied throngs at some of the stalls and the overwhelming hubbub of activity that surrounds you wherever you find yourself. It wasn’t overly noisy per se but I think that was more down to people being 100% “focused” and “intent” on making sure they went where they wanted to and got what they wanted to get! Initially we didn’t know where to go and all we could see was produce being snapped up here, there and everywhere! The world and quite literally all of its dogs were there, clamoring to get the best of what there was and it was quite something to watch. It didn’t take long for us to soon learn though, that the best stalls were the ones with the queues….and queue we did!
Stalls that particularly caught our eye included the “Happy Foods” Organic Italian Bread stall, whose artisan loaves and batons were still warm out of the oven. Ever conscious of supporting the local economy, our first purchase was a rather elegantly long and crispy bread, whose gloriously warm and yeasty smells continued to waft tantalizingly under our noses for the rest of our market spree! Willunga Almonds had an amazing range of sugared and spiced almonds (the latter including salt and vinegar or smokey bacon of all things) but our favourites were definitely the natural and almonds (so wonderfully light, crisp and crunchy and like nothing I had tasted in an almond before!) as well as the toffee almonds and yes, of course we stocked up! I was also quite taken with a stall selling chook eggs that were quite simply the biggest I have ever seen, so big in fact that the guy couldn’t even get the XL cardboard carton to actually shut! Gordon’s eyes wandered over to a pizza stall selling oven-ready pizzas with amazing toppings but I was far too absorbed at an amazing fresh pasta stand that was offering all manner of colourful and interestingly shaped fresh pastas and sauces plus a gloriously vibrant green basil, spinach and almond pesto. There were of course also plenty of opportunities to sample chutneys and preserves – one of the stars for me being a rhubarb and ginger chutney that was mellow, fruity, and warming and, as a customer enthusiastically confirmed, was “absolutely bloody brilliant with everything!”. Can’t argue with that then! Last but not least of course, I have to also bow down to the sheer quality of the vegetables, herbs and fruit - including Galaxy Gala apples so fresh they smelt like they had just been picked off the tree, which of course they had (“the supermarket doesn’t get these, we only sell them in this market”.) And oh how wonderfully affordable it all was too – I have been being ripped off in Perth!
After an hour, Gordon was market-ed out and he had to disappear off for a freshly brewed coffee at the coffee stand and demolish a bacon and egg roll! I for my part, was remarkably food-subdued in terms of eating (what on earth was going on?!), having only a made-to-order small organic O.J for my troubles – oh, and a big piece of freshly made, still comfortingly warm Italian cinnamon apple cake, from the lady selling those rather delectable fresh pastas!
Two hours and 2 1/2 big shopping bags later, we finally trudged back to the car, market-battered and torn! I felt most virtuous indeed upon getting back to our tent with our enormous array of fresh produce! And no sooner had that tent door been unzipped and those bags put on the floor, I promptly started to make Nigella Lawson’s rather delicious wholesome summer minestrone Genoese soup……eaten an hour later barley tepid for lunch, with a good dollop of that luscious bright green pesto and some of the faintly still- warm crusty bread! How lucky are the locals to have this on their doorstep every weekend? What’s that you say? Me, moving to, or near Willunga? Watch this space!
And this little piggy stayed at cellar doors……….
Yes indeed and what a pick we had, given that McLaren Vale boasts a formidable 76 contemporary cellar doors and boutique old stone wineries. The region is nestled between Mount Lofty Ranges and the beaches of the Gulf St Vincent – so quite a different landscape to the Adelaide Hills in lots of ways and initially, I thought, not as breathtaking on the eye. That said, the more we tootled around (and the more I sipped?!), the more the pretty scenery here absolutely grew and grew on me.
In short, we have had a great time visiting our selected wineries and have been blown over at once again how much better value for money they are compared to our own in Margaret River in W.A – we bought at least one purchase at every door and were only stopped by the limits of what we can carry outback, which was a shame, though we do now have a stock of about 10 bottles to keep us going – including straight shiraz, shiraz/Grenache blends, sparkling, and a cabernet sauvignon merlot (and all of them bar one with screw-caps too, which is better for us……expanding popping corks in the car in the heat of the outback would not be good!)
We were knocked out too by how friendly and unpretentious the cellar door staff were, who were delighted to chat away to you about the wines and help you to understand their blends! Indeed, it was the passion of the winemakers and cellar door staff that really struck us both as we went from vineyard to vineyard. It was quite impressive to learn that McClaren Vale winemakers are some of the world’s finest, having won countless high profile awards including 2 of Australia’s most coveted trophies – that they could work anywhere in the world but they choose to work in Mclaren Vale because of the passion of the region and the sheer diversity of grapes that can be grown here due to the warm sun, rolling hills and yet also cooling sea breezes.
McLaren Vale shirazes are much more to our liking, being mid-full bodied, really smooth and not too much peppery spice – there were also a couple of fantastic ones that were sheer dark, luscious chocolate in a glass! Wishing to avoid the overly commercial doors such as Rosemount, our noses and tastebuds took us instead to some other standout small cellar doors and vineyards. Worthy of mention include Pertaringa, Woodstock, Penny’s Hill, Samuel’s Gorge and Fox Creek (set in a beautiful old stone farmhouse and do a fantastic deep purple, rich and fruity sparkling Shiraz named Vixen, whose tagline is “nothing goes down like a Vixen!”). At Woodstock we even lingered over a sensational regional plate for lunch, dining amongst a beautiful clearing of towering gum trees – we will let the photo album say more on that!
I think the best of all of the cellar doors though, in terms of the fun we had and the exceptional quality of the wines, would have to be Primo Estate, a much more contemporary and stylish cellar door bringing some of Italy into Mclaren Vale. Within the stylish architecture of the wood, stone and Brazilian slate cellar door, we took part in the “Joseph Experience” where for a nominal fee of $10 per person (redeemable if you go on to purchase anything), we were led to a specially sectioned off part of the cellar door for a sit-down, tutored wine-tasting of 4 of their absolute premium labels that are not normally available for general cellar-door tasting. With 5 wine glasses laid out for each of us, and our very own cellar-door staff-member acting us waiter/mentor, it was a cross between being in a restaurant and having your very own private tasting! The emphasis was on understanding the wines and the winemaker, the history of the oils and wines and enjoyable anecdotes to boot, all in a very unrushed, unpretentious, friendly way. So, during about 90 minutes or so, we savoured some rather generous samples of stunning wines (an amazing pinot grigio, followed by 4 reds which included a brilliant sparkling), without having to spit out whatsoever! These were enjoyed with some cubes of fabulously mild and nutty, 24month-old, matured Grana Padano Italian parmesan, plus warm crusty bread and the best “late-harvest” olive oil they’ve produced in over 20 years. And what a magnificent oil it was too! I have never been able to reconcile why people would ruin perfectly good crusty bread by dunking it in olive oil, when they could smear it with top quality, creamy butter instead. However, I literally ate my words when I tasted their olive oil – for the first time ever, I had found an oil I loved which, with the cheese and bread, set the wines off a treat! And so a very pleasant time was had indeed, as we leisurely sipped, nibbled and dunked to the sounds of laid-back, old-time French music and stunning floor-to-ceiling views out onto cabernet vines and the Mount Lofty Ranges beyond. Surely life couldn’t get much better?! Naturally, the smiles on our faces gradually got bigger and I got a bit tipsy, having drunk a bit more than Gordon when I asked for a refill on one of the wines so that I could refresh my memory of whether I wanted to buy it or not! They were very obliging though, and I got my extra sample – it was perhaps this last extra generous drop that may well have caused me to fling most of my glass of water onto my lap, unwittingly swirling the water around in my glass as I would have done my wine, and I prayed to God no-one was looking, LOL! But all good things must come to an end and when this party ended, we left as very happy piggies indeed, with olive oil and wine purchases to boot!
This little piggy had a plane to fly……..
Hi, Gordon here! One of the things I want to do on this trip is take the opportunity to hire a plane and fly us over some of the most scenic parts of Australia. To do this I need to have an endorsement for the main type of aircraft used for hire work – the Cessna 172. When I learnt to fly it was in Piper aircraft – the principles are the same, but the details are different enough to make it necessary to do a bit of re-training before being let loose in the skies in a new type of plane. Also, as it had been a little while since I last flew, it was a good time to spend some time back in the cockpit with an instructor helping me to refine my flying a little.
So the question was where was I going to do this flying? I’d grown a little tired of flying out of the main General Aviation airport in Perth (Jandakot) which was surrounded mostly by industrial parks and wasn’t all that scenic, and being so busy a lot of time was lost taxiing and waiting for take-off and landing clearances, so I chose not to do it before we left Perth. The equivalent airports in the other main cities are basically the same, not pretty to look at and busy. So I was looking for somewhere smaller which offered a different flying experience as well as providing a good level of instruction. As we were about to leave the Adelaide and Hills area I was doing a bit of searching and discovered a company called Adelaide Bi-Planes, and I was just having a look at their web-site mostly because they have some lovely older aircraft and a have a passion for that type of flying, then I saw that they were also a flying school. Becoming even more interested I discovered that they flew out of a small aerodrome on the Fleurieu Peninsula at a place called Aldinga to the south of Adelaide, which was exactly where we were heading! It was obviously meant to be. Before booking in I went to the office and was immediately struck by the way they had set it up and with the whole atmosphere of the place. Their interest in older aircraft was reflected in the way their office and hanger was set up – while still being professional it looked like it had come from a different era. It had something you don’t normally expect to find in a flying school– a fully fitted out home-style kitchen, from which came some delightful treats – I’ll leave it to Caroline to describe how she felt at the sight of a pilot in full uniform (and apron) in the kitchen mixing a cake mix. And the location was even better than I had imagined, it was literally surrounded by the vineyards of the McLaren Vale wine district, the end of runway 21 was just 2 miles from the coastline and just to the south were some rolling hills – nothing like the Jandakot industrial parks!
To top it all off I was also fortunate enough to have a fantastic instructor - that rare mix of hugely experienced (30 odd years as an airline pilot), can fly almost anything with wings and was a great teacher.
Flying with an instructor brings an added dimension to flying – unpredictability! When I’m flying on my own it’s generally quite a tranquil affair and I enjoy the freedom and the sense of satisfaction gained from and putting skills I’ve learned into practice and flying the plane well. An instructor changes all that as they are prone to springing little surprises on you like shutting off the throttle shortly after take-off (or anywhere for that matter) and saying “engine failure – what do you do now!?!?” (panic is NOT the correct answer). They’re obviously looking to make sure you slip straight into the correct procedure to make sure you can get the plane down as safely as possible. Luckily for me, and anyone who dares fly with me in the future, I did follow correct emergency procedure.
Doing this type of training involves doing many circuits of “touch-and-go’s” and other practice routines which are generally not that exciting as you are literally going round and round in circles. However I discovered when flying in a beautiful place like Aldinga and with people who love what they’re doing, in the air and on the ground - even doing circuits can be a joy!!
And this little piggy went bush……..
Deep Creek Conservation Park was where we finally got to “go bush” for a few days and I can tell you, it was very hard place to leave! The park preserves and protects 4452 hectares/9700 acres and 18km of coastline and is the largest remnant of natural vegetation on the Fleuriue Peninsula. It is a rugged and remote place where the landscape encompasses dry coastal heathland and scrub, tall stringybark forests, shaded creeks and waterfalls, dense and lush vegetated valleys, rugged clifftops and spectacular scenic views. It’s also a haven for rare, endangered or vulnerable animal and plant species as well as home to big mobs of Western Grey Kangaroos.
We were also there because it’s renowned for having some of the most scenic and challenging bushwalking in the whole state…which of course we had to have a go at! The Deep Creek Cove Hike (7km) was a moderate hike where the highlight was the spectacular views of the azure-blue Southern Ocean and a secluded cove at the mouth of the creek itself. The trail was a constant (and at times, very steep) decline with dense coastal scrub enclosing us along much of the way - its hues of purple, sandy red and various greens made for a beautiful sight indeed. Another 7km hike was even more challenging, with it’s never ending “what goes down, must go up!” hiking rule killing our thighs, gluts and calves! Again, it was just superb to be out amongst the thick vegetation and rugged terrain that Deep Creek is known for. To get into a meditative rhythm with your walking, see no-one else on the trail and to enjoy pure silence, broken only by the occasional cries of yellow-tailed Black Cockatoos in the distance, the sweet tweeting of a nearby bird or the whooshing sound of the wind, really is a wonderful thing indeed! In addition to hikes, we also did some simple walks, always with the breathtaking ocean views as our backdrops, and very often coming face to face with roos along the way. There were also some very scenic drives (some 4WD) and one going through some of the oldest stringybark forest in S.A, which looked so pretty indeed as the sun filtered through onto its tall tress, grasses and delicate ferns.
We camped at Tapanappa – on the best of the 17 sheltered sites positioned on a ridge with stunning coastal views of Kangaroo Island, the Pages Islands and Tunkallila Beach. Tucking ourselves away into the far corner of our site made it feel even more private, with our tent surrounded as it was on 3 sides by bush - with views on 2 of those sides to an expanse of deep green bush stretching far up onto a hill, and a glimpsed view through the trees on the other, out to Tunkallilla beach in the distance. On the other side of those trees, just a hop, skip and a jump away from our tent, open rolling heathland backed out onto stunning coastal views admired as much by us as the roos!
We felt so free here and when we arrived there was only one other camper tucked away further up but we couldn’t see them or hear them day to day and, during the course of our stay, only 2 others came for a one-night stay. It was beautiful being so private yet having so much space. And, with the air being so still and a very pleasant temperature, not to mention zero mozzies and hardly any flies, it was also great not having much of the front annexe up at all – allowed us to be just out amongst it all and the birds that have come to visit us (including heaps of female Superb Fairy Wrens, some red lorikeets and a pair of red-breasted robins).
We ate very well (all my healthy purchases from Willunga Markets!), walked in the mornings, recovered back at camp in the afternoons, read, enjoyed a stillness that was only interrupted by the soft tweeting of birds, delighted in wine-o’clock (the remainder of my sauvignon blanc and superb marinated goats chevre), and got heaps of sleep. We swapped showers for “bathing” at sunset (a.k.a. standing in the buff round the back of the tent with our washing –up bowl sitting on the front trailer box, feeling free as a bird!) and we swapped flushing toilets for “aromatic” long-drop loos. (It was a long drop too, as I hilariously found out when Gordon and I had to go at the same time but his agenda was, how shall we say, slightly different to mine! Talk about Dambusters! We creased up laughing and to quote the good man himself “there is something very gratifying about the value of long-drop loos in terms of sound-feedback received!”). Sunsets were spent listening to the deafening sound of cicadas (crickets) as we basked in the last warm glows of the dipping golden sun and, as night drew in and the cold air came off the Southern Ocean, we swapped shorts and T-shirts for trousers and jumpers and hot water bottles (though on our last night we got warm air coming in off the land and that was just sublime!) Evenings were even more short-lived than in regular campsites – without any lighting to artificially keep the brain awake, stargazing turned into more and more yawning and it was all we could do to go to bed at 9pm rather than 8.30pm! Nights were noisy (so what’s new?!) with me waking up terrified to scurrying and scratching noises at the door of the tent, as if something was trying to get in. Gordon was asleep (!) but not for long because I had convinced myself it was a dingo or at the very least a brown-nosed bandicoot (about twice the size of a very large rat and known to be in the park – erm, whereas dingo’s are not LOL!). So poor Gordon gets nudged in the back, waking up to my hissing that he needs to go and “sort it out”! How embarrassed was I to learn that it was actually just a plain and simple fieldmouse – albeit an Olympian version, managing to climb up the side of the tent and trapeze itself onto the pull-out kitchentop the way that it did! (And I am not convinced that there aren’t still dingo’s in that Park…………!) Ahhhh, the joys of bushcamping!
And THIS little piggy went beer-bellied all the way home!
The last bit of our “Tour-de-Fleur” saw us driving through the historic coastal towns of Victor Harbour, Port Elliot and across to Goolwa. Victor Harbour itself was a mini Blackpool – overly touristy, pubs you wouldn’t necessarily want to linger in but great fish and chip shops (and yes, of course we supported the local economy again!). There is a 22km bike trail that hugs the flat coast from Victor to Goolwa but during our one day stay, the weather was stinking hot AND muggy with big winds to boot, so sadly there was no working off those fish and chips we had for lunch on that day! Instead, we headed on to Goolwa, once a thriving river port and the last on the Murray River before it reaches the Southern Ocean. Back in time it was the only place in Australia where paddle steamers and steam trains met to carry inland produce for shipping overseas. Now though it’s really quite shocking and sad to see how little water is left in the Murray, here at its mouth – and all because of naughty politics and economics further up the river in NSW and VIC I am told, where they are allowing wineries, cotton farms and to siphon off the water for their businesses. Water or no water though, Goolwa still reeks of history and we decided there was no better way to salute that history than by paying a visit to the rather brilliant Steam Exchange Micro-Brewery, located on the wharf in a Heritage A-listed railways goods shed! It was a quirky little place all right but with character, and as a working brewery you could see all the vats etc. We amused ourselves with the beer quotes on the tables, our favorites being “its not whether the glass is half full or half empty, it’s a matter of whether you are going to make the decision to refill it”; as well as “Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy” and then also “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy!”. Staff were very friendly and we also met the owner there (who was celebrating having just won no less than 6 Gold Awards at the Melbourne International Beer Festival!) and chatted a while with him about how he came to set up the place and about the beers. I hadn’t realized but South Australia apparently produces some of the best malting barley in the world and, like Little Creature Micro-Brewery back in W.A, all of the ales we supped were 10% malted barley, hops, spring water and yeast with no other rubbish added….so they are actually good for you, LOL! Of particular note was their true India Pale Ale (created from special ingredients imported from UK) and their Steam Ale made from American imported hops. And I loved the owner’s first recollection of the now head brewer – “a guy cuddled up to a bag of grain at a yeast conference, happily ensconced in an ale-induced slumber. I knew then that he’d make a great brewer!” And he was right - their beers were truly excellent indeed and the only shame was that they shut at 6pm! Needless to say, we were the last to leave, 6pack in hand to continue on back at the campsite, where we had left off!
So now you are at the end of our blog!
We hope you enjoyed our Tour-de-Fleur and before we leave you on this occasion, enjoy the following snippet of conversation, overheard in a campsite shower, between two northerners regarding a dog and where it sleeps at night:
- “oh we just stick him in the boot”
- “Do yer?”
- “Yeah, we do, to be honest Liz he’s just so knackered after a day’s traveling that he goes right off to sleep”
- “Ah, he’s a good dog in’t he?”
- ‘Yeah, he’s a gud dog”
Until next time folks, stay happy, smile lots and don’t forget to stay in touch yourselves – we still love getting your emails!
So, the Fleurieu Peninsula was a rather interesting mixed-bag part of South Australia and a rather mixed-bag kind of tour for us too. I guess that being a Peninsula you might be forgiven for thinking that we would have indulged in a fair bit of swimming, given the vast stretches of empty, golden sandy beaches that came one after the other. Yes, when the weather was good the water was beautifully blue but, truth be told, a lot of the time the weather didn’t play ball, (again! Bloody Southern Ocean – give me the warm and more dependable Indian Ocean in W.A any day!)…in fact when it was nice weather, we were just passing through and when we did have time to swim it was never great weather! Jeez! Also, most of the beaches weren’t our kind of beaches really (we are more “secluded cove/clifftop” people!) and the “cliff-tops” were a bit of an exaggeration on the part of the tourist brochures, given that they mostly weren’t that high or that rugged!. Perhaps the only Peninsula beach that truly stood out for us was the pretty 3km one at Maslin – which also happened to be Australia’s first nudist beach. We think we spotted a nudist bather laying prone to the world quite a way down the beach but sadly we just couldn’t be sure and, rather disappointingly, the rest of the beach was empty! It still gets top marks from us though for also being the only beach in South Australia to hold the Nude Olympics every Australia Day (3 legged races and coit-tossing eat your heart out LOL!). And of course there was our rather wonderful evening sitting atop those same Maslin “cliffs” in the wonderfully still and warm air - just the two of us, drinking some rather delicious sparkling Shiraz whilst watching the sun set, the moon rise and the stars come out to play. But I digress. When all’s said and done, we did finally manage to get our fill of rugged spectacular coastal scenery in the end, via Deep Creek Conservation Park and so this blog shall simply recount how we did the “tour-de-Fleur” in true “Flash and Caz” stylie – by going bush, introducing planes and some flying, and taking time to linger at superb wineries, a rather stunning Farmers Market, a bakery or two and a fantastic little micro-brewery. We hope you enjoy our journey as much as we did!!
So, this little piggy went to market………
Wow what a find at the top end of the Fleurieu Peninsula! Willunga Farmers Market was the first ever in South Australia and nowadays, with apparently at least 1,000 people lingering here every Saturday morning from 7a.m, it’s also recognized as one of the absolute best farmers markets in the whole of Australia too! On a cosy site in the historic town centre, Gordon and I had a chance to have our eyes boggle and pop out at the fantastic showcase of fresh, seasonal and regional produce from the 50+ stalls housing orchardists, biodynamic livestock producers and cheesemakers, vegetable growers, dairy farmers, baker, cooks, and viticulturilists! Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson would have loved to have joined us in our little bit of heaven – especially since this market has strict criteria that encourages only local seasonal produce, primary producers and sustainable production methods….nice one!
The whole point of the market is of course to sample, talk to the producers/growers and ask questions etc, as well as buy, buy, buy! There’s nothing more satisfying that hearing that the pesto you have in your hand was made literally the night before for this market day, or talking to the farmer of the locally produced biodynamic meats on his stand and understanding why they are so good for you - not to mention listening to little anecdotal stories from suppliers as to how a certain popular line came into being (i.e. the accidental discovery of “coffee almonds” when a label-maker stuffed up on the printing of what should have been “toffee almonds”. Not wanting to waste the labels, an experiment was launched that now results in big profits!).
I would love to say that the market was a casual and relaxed affair and in truth, I suppose once you have done your shopping, it can be – but you unless you have been to one of these affairs you can’t begin to imagine the near frenzied throngs at some of the stalls and the overwhelming hubbub of activity that surrounds you wherever you find yourself. It wasn’t overly noisy per se but I think that was more down to people being 100% “focused” and “intent” on making sure they went where they wanted to and got what they wanted to get! Initially we didn’t know where to go and all we could see was produce being snapped up here, there and everywhere! The world and quite literally all of its dogs were there, clamoring to get the best of what there was and it was quite something to watch. It didn’t take long for us to soon learn though, that the best stalls were the ones with the queues….and queue we did!
Stalls that particularly caught our eye included the “Happy Foods” Organic Italian Bread stall, whose artisan loaves and batons were still warm out of the oven. Ever conscious of supporting the local economy, our first purchase was a rather elegantly long and crispy bread, whose gloriously warm and yeasty smells continued to waft tantalizingly under our noses for the rest of our market spree! Willunga Almonds had an amazing range of sugared and spiced almonds (the latter including salt and vinegar or smokey bacon of all things) but our favourites were definitely the natural and almonds (so wonderfully light, crisp and crunchy and like nothing I had tasted in an almond before!) as well as the toffee almonds and yes, of course we stocked up! I was also quite taken with a stall selling chook eggs that were quite simply the biggest I have ever seen, so big in fact that the guy couldn’t even get the XL cardboard carton to actually shut! Gordon’s eyes wandered over to a pizza stall selling oven-ready pizzas with amazing toppings but I was far too absorbed at an amazing fresh pasta stand that was offering all manner of colourful and interestingly shaped fresh pastas and sauces plus a gloriously vibrant green basil, spinach and almond pesto. There were of course also plenty of opportunities to sample chutneys and preserves – one of the stars for me being a rhubarb and ginger chutney that was mellow, fruity, and warming and, as a customer enthusiastically confirmed, was “absolutely bloody brilliant with everything!”. Can’t argue with that then! Last but not least of course, I have to also bow down to the sheer quality of the vegetables, herbs and fruit - including Galaxy Gala apples so fresh they smelt like they had just been picked off the tree, which of course they had (“the supermarket doesn’t get these, we only sell them in this market”.) And oh how wonderfully affordable it all was too – I have been being ripped off in Perth!
After an hour, Gordon was market-ed out and he had to disappear off for a freshly brewed coffee at the coffee stand and demolish a bacon and egg roll! I for my part, was remarkably food-subdued in terms of eating (what on earth was going on?!), having only a made-to-order small organic O.J for my troubles – oh, and a big piece of freshly made, still comfortingly warm Italian cinnamon apple cake, from the lady selling those rather delectable fresh pastas!
Two hours and 2 1/2 big shopping bags later, we finally trudged back to the car, market-battered and torn! I felt most virtuous indeed upon getting back to our tent with our enormous array of fresh produce! And no sooner had that tent door been unzipped and those bags put on the floor, I promptly started to make Nigella Lawson’s rather delicious wholesome summer minestrone Genoese soup……eaten an hour later barley tepid for lunch, with a good dollop of that luscious bright green pesto and some of the faintly still- warm crusty bread! How lucky are the locals to have this on their doorstep every weekend? What’s that you say? Me, moving to, or near Willunga? Watch this space!
And this little piggy stayed at cellar doors……….
Yes indeed and what a pick we had, given that McLaren Vale boasts a formidable 76 contemporary cellar doors and boutique old stone wineries. The region is nestled between Mount Lofty Ranges and the beaches of the Gulf St Vincent – so quite a different landscape to the Adelaide Hills in lots of ways and initially, I thought, not as breathtaking on the eye. That said, the more we tootled around (and the more I sipped?!), the more the pretty scenery here absolutely grew and grew on me.
In short, we have had a great time visiting our selected wineries and have been blown over at once again how much better value for money they are compared to our own in Margaret River in W.A – we bought at least one purchase at every door and were only stopped by the limits of what we can carry outback, which was a shame, though we do now have a stock of about 10 bottles to keep us going – including straight shiraz, shiraz/Grenache blends, sparkling, and a cabernet sauvignon merlot (and all of them bar one with screw-caps too, which is better for us……expanding popping corks in the car in the heat of the outback would not be good!)
We were knocked out too by how friendly and unpretentious the cellar door staff were, who were delighted to chat away to you about the wines and help you to understand their blends! Indeed, it was the passion of the winemakers and cellar door staff that really struck us both as we went from vineyard to vineyard. It was quite impressive to learn that McClaren Vale winemakers are some of the world’s finest, having won countless high profile awards including 2 of Australia’s most coveted trophies – that they could work anywhere in the world but they choose to work in Mclaren Vale because of the passion of the region and the sheer diversity of grapes that can be grown here due to the warm sun, rolling hills and yet also cooling sea breezes.
McLaren Vale shirazes are much more to our liking, being mid-full bodied, really smooth and not too much peppery spice – there were also a couple of fantastic ones that were sheer dark, luscious chocolate in a glass! Wishing to avoid the overly commercial doors such as Rosemount, our noses and tastebuds took us instead to some other standout small cellar doors and vineyards. Worthy of mention include Pertaringa, Woodstock, Penny’s Hill, Samuel’s Gorge and Fox Creek (set in a beautiful old stone farmhouse and do a fantastic deep purple, rich and fruity sparkling Shiraz named Vixen, whose tagline is “nothing goes down like a Vixen!”). At Woodstock we even lingered over a sensational regional plate for lunch, dining amongst a beautiful clearing of towering gum trees – we will let the photo album say more on that!
I think the best of all of the cellar doors though, in terms of the fun we had and the exceptional quality of the wines, would have to be Primo Estate, a much more contemporary and stylish cellar door bringing some of Italy into Mclaren Vale. Within the stylish architecture of the wood, stone and Brazilian slate cellar door, we took part in the “Joseph Experience” where for a nominal fee of $10 per person (redeemable if you go on to purchase anything), we were led to a specially sectioned off part of the cellar door for a sit-down, tutored wine-tasting of 4 of their absolute premium labels that are not normally available for general cellar-door tasting. With 5 wine glasses laid out for each of us, and our very own cellar-door staff-member acting us waiter/mentor, it was a cross between being in a restaurant and having your very own private tasting! The emphasis was on understanding the wines and the winemaker, the history of the oils and wines and enjoyable anecdotes to boot, all in a very unrushed, unpretentious, friendly way. So, during about 90 minutes or so, we savoured some rather generous samples of stunning wines (an amazing pinot grigio, followed by 4 reds which included a brilliant sparkling), without having to spit out whatsoever! These were enjoyed with some cubes of fabulously mild and nutty, 24month-old, matured Grana Padano Italian parmesan, plus warm crusty bread and the best “late-harvest” olive oil they’ve produced in over 20 years. And what a magnificent oil it was too! I have never been able to reconcile why people would ruin perfectly good crusty bread by dunking it in olive oil, when they could smear it with top quality, creamy butter instead. However, I literally ate my words when I tasted their olive oil – for the first time ever, I had found an oil I loved which, with the cheese and bread, set the wines off a treat! And so a very pleasant time was had indeed, as we leisurely sipped, nibbled and dunked to the sounds of laid-back, old-time French music and stunning floor-to-ceiling views out onto cabernet vines and the Mount Lofty Ranges beyond. Surely life couldn’t get much better?! Naturally, the smiles on our faces gradually got bigger and I got a bit tipsy, having drunk a bit more than Gordon when I asked for a refill on one of the wines so that I could refresh my memory of whether I wanted to buy it or not! They were very obliging though, and I got my extra sample – it was perhaps this last extra generous drop that may well have caused me to fling most of my glass of water onto my lap, unwittingly swirling the water around in my glass as I would have done my wine, and I prayed to God no-one was looking, LOL! But all good things must come to an end and when this party ended, we left as very happy piggies indeed, with olive oil and wine purchases to boot!
This little piggy had a plane to fly……..
Hi, Gordon here! One of the things I want to do on this trip is take the opportunity to hire a plane and fly us over some of the most scenic parts of Australia. To do this I need to have an endorsement for the main type of aircraft used for hire work – the Cessna 172. When I learnt to fly it was in Piper aircraft – the principles are the same, but the details are different enough to make it necessary to do a bit of re-training before being let loose in the skies in a new type of plane. Also, as it had been a little while since I last flew, it was a good time to spend some time back in the cockpit with an instructor helping me to refine my flying a little.
So the question was where was I going to do this flying? I’d grown a little tired of flying out of the main General Aviation airport in Perth (Jandakot) which was surrounded mostly by industrial parks and wasn’t all that scenic, and being so busy a lot of time was lost taxiing and waiting for take-off and landing clearances, so I chose not to do it before we left Perth. The equivalent airports in the other main cities are basically the same, not pretty to look at and busy. So I was looking for somewhere smaller which offered a different flying experience as well as providing a good level of instruction. As we were about to leave the Adelaide and Hills area I was doing a bit of searching and discovered a company called Adelaide Bi-Planes, and I was just having a look at their web-site mostly because they have some lovely older aircraft and a have a passion for that type of flying, then I saw that they were also a flying school. Becoming even more interested I discovered that they flew out of a small aerodrome on the Fleurieu Peninsula at a place called Aldinga to the south of Adelaide, which was exactly where we were heading! It was obviously meant to be. Before booking in I went to the office and was immediately struck by the way they had set it up and with the whole atmosphere of the place. Their interest in older aircraft was reflected in the way their office and hanger was set up – while still being professional it looked like it had come from a different era. It had something you don’t normally expect to find in a flying school– a fully fitted out home-style kitchen, from which came some delightful treats – I’ll leave it to Caroline to describe how she felt at the sight of a pilot in full uniform (and apron) in the kitchen mixing a cake mix. And the location was even better than I had imagined, it was literally surrounded by the vineyards of the McLaren Vale wine district, the end of runway 21 was just 2 miles from the coastline and just to the south were some rolling hills – nothing like the Jandakot industrial parks!
To top it all off I was also fortunate enough to have a fantastic instructor - that rare mix of hugely experienced (30 odd years as an airline pilot), can fly almost anything with wings and was a great teacher.
Flying with an instructor brings an added dimension to flying – unpredictability! When I’m flying on my own it’s generally quite a tranquil affair and I enjoy the freedom and the sense of satisfaction gained from and putting skills I’ve learned into practice and flying the plane well. An instructor changes all that as they are prone to springing little surprises on you like shutting off the throttle shortly after take-off (or anywhere for that matter) and saying “engine failure – what do you do now!?!?” (panic is NOT the correct answer). They’re obviously looking to make sure you slip straight into the correct procedure to make sure you can get the plane down as safely as possible. Luckily for me, and anyone who dares fly with me in the future, I did follow correct emergency procedure.
Doing this type of training involves doing many circuits of “touch-and-go’s” and other practice routines which are generally not that exciting as you are literally going round and round in circles. However I discovered when flying in a beautiful place like Aldinga and with people who love what they’re doing, in the air and on the ground - even doing circuits can be a joy!!
And this little piggy went bush……..
Deep Creek Conservation Park was where we finally got to “go bush” for a few days and I can tell you, it was very hard place to leave! The park preserves and protects 4452 hectares/9700 acres and 18km of coastline and is the largest remnant of natural vegetation on the Fleuriue Peninsula. It is a rugged and remote place where the landscape encompasses dry coastal heathland and scrub, tall stringybark forests, shaded creeks and waterfalls, dense and lush vegetated valleys, rugged clifftops and spectacular scenic views. It’s also a haven for rare, endangered or vulnerable animal and plant species as well as home to big mobs of Western Grey Kangaroos.
We were also there because it’s renowned for having some of the most scenic and challenging bushwalking in the whole state…which of course we had to have a go at! The Deep Creek Cove Hike (7km) was a moderate hike where the highlight was the spectacular views of the azure-blue Southern Ocean and a secluded cove at the mouth of the creek itself. The trail was a constant (and at times, very steep) decline with dense coastal scrub enclosing us along much of the way - its hues of purple, sandy red and various greens made for a beautiful sight indeed. Another 7km hike was even more challenging, with it’s never ending “what goes down, must go up!” hiking rule killing our thighs, gluts and calves! Again, it was just superb to be out amongst the thick vegetation and rugged terrain that Deep Creek is known for. To get into a meditative rhythm with your walking, see no-one else on the trail and to enjoy pure silence, broken only by the occasional cries of yellow-tailed Black Cockatoos in the distance, the sweet tweeting of a nearby bird or the whooshing sound of the wind, really is a wonderful thing indeed! In addition to hikes, we also did some simple walks, always with the breathtaking ocean views as our backdrops, and very often coming face to face with roos along the way. There were also some very scenic drives (some 4WD) and one going through some of the oldest stringybark forest in S.A, which looked so pretty indeed as the sun filtered through onto its tall tress, grasses and delicate ferns.
We camped at Tapanappa – on the best of the 17 sheltered sites positioned on a ridge with stunning coastal views of Kangaroo Island, the Pages Islands and Tunkallila Beach. Tucking ourselves away into the far corner of our site made it feel even more private, with our tent surrounded as it was on 3 sides by bush - with views on 2 of those sides to an expanse of deep green bush stretching far up onto a hill, and a glimpsed view through the trees on the other, out to Tunkallilla beach in the distance. On the other side of those trees, just a hop, skip and a jump away from our tent, open rolling heathland backed out onto stunning coastal views admired as much by us as the roos!
We felt so free here and when we arrived there was only one other camper tucked away further up but we couldn’t see them or hear them day to day and, during the course of our stay, only 2 others came for a one-night stay. It was beautiful being so private yet having so much space. And, with the air being so still and a very pleasant temperature, not to mention zero mozzies and hardly any flies, it was also great not having much of the front annexe up at all – allowed us to be just out amongst it all and the birds that have come to visit us (including heaps of female Superb Fairy Wrens, some red lorikeets and a pair of red-breasted robins).
We ate very well (all my healthy purchases from Willunga Markets!), walked in the mornings, recovered back at camp in the afternoons, read, enjoyed a stillness that was only interrupted by the soft tweeting of birds, delighted in wine-o’clock (the remainder of my sauvignon blanc and superb marinated goats chevre), and got heaps of sleep. We swapped showers for “bathing” at sunset (a.k.a. standing in the buff round the back of the tent with our washing –up bowl sitting on the front trailer box, feeling free as a bird!) and we swapped flushing toilets for “aromatic” long-drop loos. (It was a long drop too, as I hilariously found out when Gordon and I had to go at the same time but his agenda was, how shall we say, slightly different to mine! Talk about Dambusters! We creased up laughing and to quote the good man himself “there is something very gratifying about the value of long-drop loos in terms of sound-feedback received!”). Sunsets were spent listening to the deafening sound of cicadas (crickets) as we basked in the last warm glows of the dipping golden sun and, as night drew in and the cold air came off the Southern Ocean, we swapped shorts and T-shirts for trousers and jumpers and hot water bottles (though on our last night we got warm air coming in off the land and that was just sublime!) Evenings were even more short-lived than in regular campsites – without any lighting to artificially keep the brain awake, stargazing turned into more and more yawning and it was all we could do to go to bed at 9pm rather than 8.30pm! Nights were noisy (so what’s new?!) with me waking up terrified to scurrying and scratching noises at the door of the tent, as if something was trying to get in. Gordon was asleep (!) but not for long because I had convinced myself it was a dingo or at the very least a brown-nosed bandicoot (about twice the size of a very large rat and known to be in the park – erm, whereas dingo’s are not LOL!). So poor Gordon gets nudged in the back, waking up to my hissing that he needs to go and “sort it out”! How embarrassed was I to learn that it was actually just a plain and simple fieldmouse – albeit an Olympian version, managing to climb up the side of the tent and trapeze itself onto the pull-out kitchentop the way that it did! (And I am not convinced that there aren’t still dingo’s in that Park…………!) Ahhhh, the joys of bushcamping!
And THIS little piggy went beer-bellied all the way home!
The last bit of our “Tour-de-Fleur” saw us driving through the historic coastal towns of Victor Harbour, Port Elliot and across to Goolwa. Victor Harbour itself was a mini Blackpool – overly touristy, pubs you wouldn’t necessarily want to linger in but great fish and chip shops (and yes, of course we supported the local economy again!). There is a 22km bike trail that hugs the flat coast from Victor to Goolwa but during our one day stay, the weather was stinking hot AND muggy with big winds to boot, so sadly there was no working off those fish and chips we had for lunch on that day! Instead, we headed on to Goolwa, once a thriving river port and the last on the Murray River before it reaches the Southern Ocean. Back in time it was the only place in Australia where paddle steamers and steam trains met to carry inland produce for shipping overseas. Now though it’s really quite shocking and sad to see how little water is left in the Murray, here at its mouth – and all because of naughty politics and economics further up the river in NSW and VIC I am told, where they are allowing wineries, cotton farms and to siphon off the water for their businesses. Water or no water though, Goolwa still reeks of history and we decided there was no better way to salute that history than by paying a visit to the rather brilliant Steam Exchange Micro-Brewery, located on the wharf in a Heritage A-listed railways goods shed! It was a quirky little place all right but with character, and as a working brewery you could see all the vats etc. We amused ourselves with the beer quotes on the tables, our favorites being “its not whether the glass is half full or half empty, it’s a matter of whether you are going to make the decision to refill it”; as well as “Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy” and then also “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy!”. Staff were very friendly and we also met the owner there (who was celebrating having just won no less than 6 Gold Awards at the Melbourne International Beer Festival!) and chatted a while with him about how he came to set up the place and about the beers. I hadn’t realized but South Australia apparently produces some of the best malting barley in the world and, like Little Creature Micro-Brewery back in W.A, all of the ales we supped were 10% malted barley, hops, spring water and yeast with no other rubbish added….so they are actually good for you, LOL! Of particular note was their true India Pale Ale (created from special ingredients imported from UK) and their Steam Ale made from American imported hops. And I loved the owner’s first recollection of the now head brewer – “a guy cuddled up to a bag of grain at a yeast conference, happily ensconced in an ale-induced slumber. I knew then that he’d make a great brewer!” And he was right - their beers were truly excellent indeed and the only shame was that they shut at 6pm! Needless to say, we were the last to leave, 6pack in hand to continue on back at the campsite, where we had left off!
So now you are at the end of our blog!
We hope you enjoyed our Tour-de-Fleur and before we leave you on this occasion, enjoy the following snippet of conversation, overheard in a campsite shower, between two northerners regarding a dog and where it sleeps at night:
- “oh we just stick him in the boot”
- “Do yer?”
- “Yeah, we do, to be honest Liz he’s just so knackered after a day’s traveling that he goes right off to sleep”
- “Ah, he’s a good dog in’t he?”
- ‘Yeah, he’s a gud dog”
Until next time folks, stay happy, smile lots and don’t forget to stay in touch yourselves – we still love getting your emails!
Saturday, March 14, 2009
Post 7 - Greetings from the Adelaide Hills - Journal
Greetings from the Adelaide Hills, S.A!
I will start this blog with a couple of very quick yet pertinent facts. South Australia hasn’t had rain for the last 85 days - even in the Adelaide Hills which normally does get a good amount. There has been a severe drought situation in the state for years, there are water restrictions that ensure no-one has a green lawn anymore, the Murray River is dangerously low/empty in some places and, in a bid to ensure their own survival, some trees have been known to drop huge thick branches, that have ended up killing the one or two people they hit. So, given all this, what do you think the odds were of us landing in Adelaide and the Hills, to the first rain they have had in those last dry 85 days and, more frustratingly, to the first WEEK of rain and grey skies and cool temperatures?! Pretty slim you might say but we certainly managed to pull that one off well! I guess you could say it was pretty crappy timing for us yet evidently, by the big fat grin on the welly-clad newsreader standing in the Torrens river, it’s all been pretty bloody brilliant for the people in Adelaide!
Due to the rain we ended up extending our trip by a few more days. We were rewarded with much better weather to get out and about in the really pretty tapestry of the region - impressive hills and gorges, picturesque valleys, rolling vineyards (the only thing in South Australia that seems to be lush and green!) and parched pastureland.
So, this blog will be a tale told in two parts – the first, where, due to the awful weather, we just ate our way round the notorious hotbed of foodie-delights that is the Hills….and the second part, where the weather got better and we started to exercise our excesses off!
Food, glorious food! A tale about how to escape the rains……….
Ok, so we have to confess, coming to the Adelaide Hills was one of the big foodie-highlights we had been looking forward to and it hasn’t disappointed! It’s famous for its strawberries, raspberries and cherries in summer; apples, pears, plums and quinces in autumn and leeks, lettuces galore and rhubarb all year round and is a melting pot also of gourmet cheeses, olives, figs, jams, chocolate, artisan breads, and German-style bakeries and meat producers. All of this amazing produce is to be enjoyed at the various wineries, organic cafes and farmers/local markets, restaurants and providores. And with every little town in the Hills also having its own character-filled pub or two, this is, in short, our kind of foodie-heaven on earth!
Given that the first 5 days of our stay here was absolute rubbish weather, we decided to hit the foodie-trail full on and not really do much self-catering back at the tent. So, unusually for us, we missed breakfasts and sometimes dinners, just to be able to sample all that we wanted and yes, some of the food WAS healthy…and some of it wasn’t – but for 5 days out of an otherwise very health-conscious lifestyle, the bad stuff wouldn’t kill us!
First up, we found a little bit of England in this fantastic old-English style pub, carrying over 120 different beers and complete with hand-pumps for pulling pints of Old Speckled Hen amongst other things! In “Flash and Caz” style, we christened our arrival night in the Hills by dining here. Some amazing sweet and jammy baked figs with salty proscuitto and brie were followed by roast pork loin and sensational crackling that tasted just like Frazzles….and the finale came in the form of an obscenely decadent and rather unique trifle for desert (see photo album for more info!) In short, it was the perfect antidote to all the rain and wind that was going on outside.
Our first real “foodie-trail” took us the next day to the German village of Hahndorf, where I indulged in some reminiscing of times spent in the real Germany years ago. It was a foul day, cold and gloomy – the perfect day in a way for “sampling”! Hot chocolate and a shared piece of cake here, a few heavenly sniffs in (and purchases) at the German butcher there, followed by a trio of German sausages and sauerkraut for lunch, progressing to a yummy tasting of various hand-crafted artisan goats cheeses later on (and purchases), and then on to buy a bottle of sparkling from Nepenthe winery and a huge punnet of fresh strawberries from the local strawberry farm. Phew! After that lot, you would think that there was no room for more eating, but I must stress, other than lunch, most of it was small samples, and we did miss breakfast deliberately – so somehow there was still a bit of room later on back at camp, to enjoy a glass of sparkling with the strawberries and amazing goats curd and goats brie we had bought earlier! Who cares about rubbish weather eh?!
As the days went by and the rubbish weather continued to get in the way of hiking, cycling or even being able to take photos of the Hills themselves, we happily continued on other “foodie-trails”! A very enjoyable half an hour was spent lingering at Woodside Cheesewrights, while a very informative lady took us through umpteen generous tastings of fantastic hand-made, multi-award winning cheeses that only use milk sourced from small local dairies etc. Naturally we bought a thing or two there, to add to our now growing collection back in the fridge, as one does! Then there were the cute little roadside wooden stalls dotted over the Hills selling local apples, apple juice, local eggs and honey – we went to one called Apple Fields Orchard Shop which was famous for its home-baked huge-domed apple pies with shortbread-like pastry – I will let the photo album say more about that but needless to say it was very tasty indeed! On another gloomy day of Chills in the Hills, Bullocks Woodfired Oven Eatery was an absolute gem of a find for lunch. We polished off one of his specialty thin and crispy woodfired pizzas, topped with amazing locally grown produce of incredibly smoky Kanmantoo bacon, mushrooms and Spanish red onion, along with wonderfully earthy provolone cheese and yummy stringy boconncini cheese. It was divine, as was the coffee he made – and for both of these things to practically score 10/10 with Gordon, it was a definite winner of a place! And. as if we foodie-heroes hadn’t had enough excitement for one lunch, we then watched him remove a steaming tray of upside down sponge from the wood-fired oven, and turn it out on the table near us to reveal a layer of luscious deep purple, caramelized, jammy plum and quince topping! Wow! Of course, we had to sample – just a slice between us you understand, with a little cream of course! What a joyously light yet total “comfort-food” stunner it was too, the perfect accompaniment to our comforting pizza!
For the past two days now the weather has been absolutely stunning……but hey, that doesn’t mean the food tasting has to stop!! A very pleasant couple of hours indeed has been spent at Nepenthe winery, resting our stiff and aching bodies from the hike we did yesterday, by enjoying a glass or two of chilled sauvignon blanc along with a very more-ish cheese platter. (I loved what the wine label said: “The original ‘Nepenthe” was described in Homer’s The Odyssey as a drink so powerful that it eased grief and banished sorrow from the mind”). Stunning views accompanied us while we sipped and picked to our hearts content! Much later on, drinking and “picking” still seemed to be the order of the day as we returned to the wonderful old-English pub in Macclesfield and there, in the lovely surrounds of their sun-filled beer-garden, we shared a rather stunning “modern regional plate” of olives, spicy apple chutney, local chorizo, kangaroo mettwurst, Kanmantoo bacon, goats curd, and some rather fantastic toasted walnut bread…..all washed down for Gordon with a pint of Old Speckled Hen! Now you can’t get more civilized than all that!
And last but not least, the multi-award-winning organic market and café located in well-heeled Stirling has also got quite a look in from us. This market is home to South Australia’s widest range of certified organic, biodynamic, preservative-free products that include regional gourmet produce too. My eyes literally boggled – never before have I seen so many healthy, conscious-consumer offerings under one roof and just the sheer diversity of different shaped lettuce-heads ranging from various shades of vibrant green to hues of deep purple, were enough to make me repent my recent sins and be a health-nut for the rest of my days! Naturally we stocked up on a few things- and then promptly sat our bums down in the cozy, vibrant and seemingly very popular café, to tuck into what turned out to be a stunning lunch of wholesome goodness!
I could go on and on (what? I already have???!) but in short, the Adelaide Hills ROCK for food and we are DEFINITELY coming back!!!!
What goes in must come off! A tale about undoing foodie-excesses!
It is true we like to be active - after all, that’s half the point about this trip – we are just saying we would have preferred it if we could have spread that activity out a bit more! As it was though, with all that bad weather, we only had 4 days at the end in which to do a training session and also get out, explore and work off all those foodie excesses!
First up, there was some great bushwalking in the National Park near camp, which resulted in fantastic chance sightings of more wild native koalas low down in the trees. Both there and back at camp it has been so much fun to stand and watch and photograph them – we hope you enjoy our photo album where they are surely the stars of the show!
Aside from bushwalking we have also had the chance to get out and do some hiking. The first hike, from Waterfall Gully up to Mount Loft Summit (the highest point of the Hills) was pretty difficult and challenging. Whilst it was only 8km long and not enormously high (710m/220ft), over 80% of the trail comprised 1 in 3 and 1in 4 steep gravel inclines. These inclines killed our calves and gluts on the way up - where we were convinced we got rid of the bacon, sausages, apple pie and cream at least - and made for a very impressive knee-trembling and thigh-tensing experience on the way down (where I reckon I also worked off some of my recent cheese intake too!) As always, what makes it all worthwhile is not just the challenge of whether you can get to the top in one piece whilst keeping your lungs in pace with your panting, but what you see along the way. This trail started at an actual waterfall (thanks to recent rains) and then wound its way past scenic gorges, along boggy swamps with lush fern gullies and pretty Blackwood trees and then on through to stringy-bark forests, where we saw our first Red-Browed Firetail - a stunning and quick little bird with flame-red markings but bloody impossible to photograph! At the final summit we were rewarded with amazing panoramic views over to Adelaide CBD and suburbs, the plains and the coastline of the Gulf of St Vincent.
Next day we were hiking again, this time a 2 ½ hr stint in the Morialta Gorge and on an even hotter day! We walked and sweated round the rim of the escarpment, with lots of scuttles and rustles to accompany us, as little tawny dragon lizards and small skinks darted for cover under leaf litter. From various lookout points there were some rather outstanding views of the gorge and its towering cliffs, not to mention a pretty unique long-view of the gorge with the Adelaide coastline far beyond it.
And proving that perhaps we were not just gluttons but clearly also glutton for punishment, the nest day saw us doing a 30km cycle along the river Torrens, from its mouth at the coast, into Adelaide city and then back again. It was pretty weird to see the mouth of the river practically dry whilst other parts further on by comparison were full (and in one place bizarrely, had almost ridiculously vibrant green grass alongside it). A nice enough river to cycle along but sorry Adelaide, we had to agree, it just wasn’t a patch on the river cycle you can do in Perth!
Camp-notes –gorgeous surrounds; wet tent funny shenanigans; noisy nights, killer-seedpods and sleepy koalas!
One of the reasons we also extended our stay here is that the campsite is just gorgeous, set in a National Park that is only 15mins/7km to the CBD of Adelaide, 15mins to the Hills and even right next to a small suburb, but you would never know – its that tranquil and a world of its own. The little thoroughfare that everyone camps on is lined with beautiful Dutch Elms that are starting to turn colour and once the nice weather returned, it has been just so relaxing to sit underneath them and listen to them rustle during the afternoon. We have ducks walking around us, a few wild koalas and of course, heaps of birds!
After 4 days or so of it, I am so over the rain – it is noisy, it is wet and I am not in control of when it stops lol! It created quite a farce too on the second day, when the first main torrential downpour took us quite by surprise. You see, due to the nature of the site we were given, our front annexe had to be pitched on a slight incline which meant that in the downpour that then followed, the rain started to not only run back and pool rather weightily on the roof in a couple of places not but also create rivulets all over the annexe floor as it came through the mesh walls! Funny scenes of course ensued with me inside and getting wet through the mesh as I tried to not only adjust the slope of the roof by adjusting the height of a couple of the poles, but also kept jumping up to the roof with arms high in the air to try and bounce the pooling water up and off it…..big sheets of it would then crash down the side mesh-wall and soak me some more on the way down not to mention drench Gordon, who unluckily was in the wrong place at the wrong time on the outside! Out there, he was just clanging away on the tent pegs with his hammer as he adjusted guy ropes and tried to put up a couple of tarps to keep the rain out! By the end of it you should have seen the state of both the pair of us (Gordon was a complete drowned rat) and the state of the tent floor, which by the end of it all was covered in the muddy wet towels and tea shirts I had used to do a mop-up job!!. And they say South Australia is hot and dry?????????????
Not content with featuring during the day, the rain has also had a starring role at night too and has played a definite part in the noisy nights I have had so far at this campsite! Torrential downpours in the middle of the night were on the agenda again for the next 3 nights of our stay and it really does make quite a racket when you are under canvas under a large tree! The pattern was a familiar one - I either went to bed or woke up to the sounds of leaves mega-rustling and the soft and gentle pitter-patter of rain on the canvas roof. An ominous sign! That pitter-patter quickly became like pins, which, as the raindrops ominously fattened, then gave way to random bubble-wrap “popping” sounds and a weather-front that seemed to mean business. Sure enough, after this everything just seemed to intensify, as if a huge giant were playing with a big vat of rusty old nails, pouring them in a continuous stream onto our tent from a great height. On each occasion of course, Gordon was fast asleep (!) and just as I was still wondering how our tent could stay water-tight, the volume of the downpour cranked up a notch or two in line with the pounding pace of the drenching, until it reached deafening proportions, stopped even sounding like rain and started sounding more like static or the loud crackling of an old gramophone player! And then, quite abruptly, it would all stop - just like that – and we would go back to the bubblewrap “popping” sounds on the roof as the leaves of the tree above us loosened their load and from there, back to pitter patter – before the whole cycle would kick off all over again……and again….. and again!!! Perhaps by about the third night, when I realized our bedroom tent WAS watertight after all, I started to like the sound of it all more – after all, I was incredibly snug and warm on my sheepskin underlay and with my duvet and blankets over me!
But I can’t blame just the rain for my disturbed nights here either - we have also had noisy nights due to the sounds of the Barking Owl (yep, VERY funny that one and truly does sound like a dog yapping!) and a resident magpie that insists on doing a monotonous and repetitive call for half an hour in the early hours of the morning! Plus of course I must give the wild native koalas a mention, which come in during the night from other areas of the National Park and settle in the gum trees here. They either growl (rather like a dog that has a bone and he doesn’t want you to go near it) or make a grunting sound which is almost like a ‘bearing down” (as if they really are having a s**t!!!) Paradoxically, this bearing down and grunting sounds remarkably like snoring too – very, very cute!. (And they’re even cuter when you spot them the next day, up a tree near your tent, either fast asleep or trying very hard to keep their eyelids open (as are WE after all their bloody night-time noise!).
After quite a bit of disturbed sleep you can therefore imagine how startling it is, to be then rudely awoken in the morning for good measure by the sound of killer-seedpods from the tree we are camped under! Not content with hurling their missiles on Gordon’s head during the day (very funny! Not quite a direct hit yet but I am hopeful, lol!), they then catapult themselves off the tree first thing in the morning before even the Kookaburras can get a look in with their raucous wake-up call! It really does make you jump out of your skin and it sounds like a person is hurling things deliberately at us, such is the force of impact from these bloody things!
So are the Hills a contender for us to settle in when we are done with traveling?
Well, it is certainly heaps cheaper to indulge in the wineries and food here than say at Swan Valley in Perth or Margaret River wine region in south west W.A and, though we weren’t there at the right time to catch the growers markets etc, we know that the Hills have stacks more than Perth! The sheer range of pubs, markets and regional gourmet and biodynamic/organic produce really does blow Perth out of the water, so we give it all top marks there too! Alas there are no sunsets over water and it gets bloody chilly and grim in winter but sadly never cold enough for snow (unlike some other parts of Oz we have our eyes on). And yet…… the proximity of the Hills to the huge environmental diversity of S.A makes for a very compelling reason to move here. Mmmmmm – watch this space, though I suspect NSW will be a tough competitor later on!
And that, my friends, has been the Adelaide Hills! Bon Apetit!
I will start this blog with a couple of very quick yet pertinent facts. South Australia hasn’t had rain for the last 85 days - even in the Adelaide Hills which normally does get a good amount. There has been a severe drought situation in the state for years, there are water restrictions that ensure no-one has a green lawn anymore, the Murray River is dangerously low/empty in some places and, in a bid to ensure their own survival, some trees have been known to drop huge thick branches, that have ended up killing the one or two people they hit. So, given all this, what do you think the odds were of us landing in Adelaide and the Hills, to the first rain they have had in those last dry 85 days and, more frustratingly, to the first WEEK of rain and grey skies and cool temperatures?! Pretty slim you might say but we certainly managed to pull that one off well! I guess you could say it was pretty crappy timing for us yet evidently, by the big fat grin on the welly-clad newsreader standing in the Torrens river, it’s all been pretty bloody brilliant for the people in Adelaide!
Due to the rain we ended up extending our trip by a few more days. We were rewarded with much better weather to get out and about in the really pretty tapestry of the region - impressive hills and gorges, picturesque valleys, rolling vineyards (the only thing in South Australia that seems to be lush and green!) and parched pastureland.
So, this blog will be a tale told in two parts – the first, where, due to the awful weather, we just ate our way round the notorious hotbed of foodie-delights that is the Hills….and the second part, where the weather got better and we started to exercise our excesses off!
Food, glorious food! A tale about how to escape the rains……….
Ok, so we have to confess, coming to the Adelaide Hills was one of the big foodie-highlights we had been looking forward to and it hasn’t disappointed! It’s famous for its strawberries, raspberries and cherries in summer; apples, pears, plums and quinces in autumn and leeks, lettuces galore and rhubarb all year round and is a melting pot also of gourmet cheeses, olives, figs, jams, chocolate, artisan breads, and German-style bakeries and meat producers. All of this amazing produce is to be enjoyed at the various wineries, organic cafes and farmers/local markets, restaurants and providores. And with every little town in the Hills also having its own character-filled pub or two, this is, in short, our kind of foodie-heaven on earth!
Given that the first 5 days of our stay here was absolute rubbish weather, we decided to hit the foodie-trail full on and not really do much self-catering back at the tent. So, unusually for us, we missed breakfasts and sometimes dinners, just to be able to sample all that we wanted and yes, some of the food WAS healthy…and some of it wasn’t – but for 5 days out of an otherwise very health-conscious lifestyle, the bad stuff wouldn’t kill us!
First up, we found a little bit of England in this fantastic old-English style pub, carrying over 120 different beers and complete with hand-pumps for pulling pints of Old Speckled Hen amongst other things! In “Flash and Caz” style, we christened our arrival night in the Hills by dining here. Some amazing sweet and jammy baked figs with salty proscuitto and brie were followed by roast pork loin and sensational crackling that tasted just like Frazzles….and the finale came in the form of an obscenely decadent and rather unique trifle for desert (see photo album for more info!) In short, it was the perfect antidote to all the rain and wind that was going on outside.
Our first real “foodie-trail” took us the next day to the German village of Hahndorf, where I indulged in some reminiscing of times spent in the real Germany years ago. It was a foul day, cold and gloomy – the perfect day in a way for “sampling”! Hot chocolate and a shared piece of cake here, a few heavenly sniffs in (and purchases) at the German butcher there, followed by a trio of German sausages and sauerkraut for lunch, progressing to a yummy tasting of various hand-crafted artisan goats cheeses later on (and purchases), and then on to buy a bottle of sparkling from Nepenthe winery and a huge punnet of fresh strawberries from the local strawberry farm. Phew! After that lot, you would think that there was no room for more eating, but I must stress, other than lunch, most of it was small samples, and we did miss breakfast deliberately – so somehow there was still a bit of room later on back at camp, to enjoy a glass of sparkling with the strawberries and amazing goats curd and goats brie we had bought earlier! Who cares about rubbish weather eh?!
As the days went by and the rubbish weather continued to get in the way of hiking, cycling or even being able to take photos of the Hills themselves, we happily continued on other “foodie-trails”! A very enjoyable half an hour was spent lingering at Woodside Cheesewrights, while a very informative lady took us through umpteen generous tastings of fantastic hand-made, multi-award winning cheeses that only use milk sourced from small local dairies etc. Naturally we bought a thing or two there, to add to our now growing collection back in the fridge, as one does! Then there were the cute little roadside wooden stalls dotted over the Hills selling local apples, apple juice, local eggs and honey – we went to one called Apple Fields Orchard Shop which was famous for its home-baked huge-domed apple pies with shortbread-like pastry – I will let the photo album say more about that but needless to say it was very tasty indeed! On another gloomy day of Chills in the Hills, Bullocks Woodfired Oven Eatery was an absolute gem of a find for lunch. We polished off one of his specialty thin and crispy woodfired pizzas, topped with amazing locally grown produce of incredibly smoky Kanmantoo bacon, mushrooms and Spanish red onion, along with wonderfully earthy provolone cheese and yummy stringy boconncini cheese. It was divine, as was the coffee he made – and for both of these things to practically score 10/10 with Gordon, it was a definite winner of a place! And. as if we foodie-heroes hadn’t had enough excitement for one lunch, we then watched him remove a steaming tray of upside down sponge from the wood-fired oven, and turn it out on the table near us to reveal a layer of luscious deep purple, caramelized, jammy plum and quince topping! Wow! Of course, we had to sample – just a slice between us you understand, with a little cream of course! What a joyously light yet total “comfort-food” stunner it was too, the perfect accompaniment to our comforting pizza!
For the past two days now the weather has been absolutely stunning……but hey, that doesn’t mean the food tasting has to stop!! A very pleasant couple of hours indeed has been spent at Nepenthe winery, resting our stiff and aching bodies from the hike we did yesterday, by enjoying a glass or two of chilled sauvignon blanc along with a very more-ish cheese platter. (I loved what the wine label said: “The original ‘Nepenthe” was described in Homer’s The Odyssey as a drink so powerful that it eased grief and banished sorrow from the mind”). Stunning views accompanied us while we sipped and picked to our hearts content! Much later on, drinking and “picking” still seemed to be the order of the day as we returned to the wonderful old-English pub in Macclesfield and there, in the lovely surrounds of their sun-filled beer-garden, we shared a rather stunning “modern regional plate” of olives, spicy apple chutney, local chorizo, kangaroo mettwurst, Kanmantoo bacon, goats curd, and some rather fantastic toasted walnut bread…..all washed down for Gordon with a pint of Old Speckled Hen! Now you can’t get more civilized than all that!
And last but not least, the multi-award-winning organic market and café located in well-heeled Stirling has also got quite a look in from us. This market is home to South Australia’s widest range of certified organic, biodynamic, preservative-free products that include regional gourmet produce too. My eyes literally boggled – never before have I seen so many healthy, conscious-consumer offerings under one roof and just the sheer diversity of different shaped lettuce-heads ranging from various shades of vibrant green to hues of deep purple, were enough to make me repent my recent sins and be a health-nut for the rest of my days! Naturally we stocked up on a few things- and then promptly sat our bums down in the cozy, vibrant and seemingly very popular café, to tuck into what turned out to be a stunning lunch of wholesome goodness!
I could go on and on (what? I already have???!) but in short, the Adelaide Hills ROCK for food and we are DEFINITELY coming back!!!!
What goes in must come off! A tale about undoing foodie-excesses!
It is true we like to be active - after all, that’s half the point about this trip – we are just saying we would have preferred it if we could have spread that activity out a bit more! As it was though, with all that bad weather, we only had 4 days at the end in which to do a training session and also get out, explore and work off all those foodie excesses!
First up, there was some great bushwalking in the National Park near camp, which resulted in fantastic chance sightings of more wild native koalas low down in the trees. Both there and back at camp it has been so much fun to stand and watch and photograph them – we hope you enjoy our photo album where they are surely the stars of the show!
Aside from bushwalking we have also had the chance to get out and do some hiking. The first hike, from Waterfall Gully up to Mount Loft Summit (the highest point of the Hills) was pretty difficult and challenging. Whilst it was only 8km long and not enormously high (710m/220ft), over 80% of the trail comprised 1 in 3 and 1in 4 steep gravel inclines. These inclines killed our calves and gluts on the way up - where we were convinced we got rid of the bacon, sausages, apple pie and cream at least - and made for a very impressive knee-trembling and thigh-tensing experience on the way down (where I reckon I also worked off some of my recent cheese intake too!) As always, what makes it all worthwhile is not just the challenge of whether you can get to the top in one piece whilst keeping your lungs in pace with your panting, but what you see along the way. This trail started at an actual waterfall (thanks to recent rains) and then wound its way past scenic gorges, along boggy swamps with lush fern gullies and pretty Blackwood trees and then on through to stringy-bark forests, where we saw our first Red-Browed Firetail - a stunning and quick little bird with flame-red markings but bloody impossible to photograph! At the final summit we were rewarded with amazing panoramic views over to Adelaide CBD and suburbs, the plains and the coastline of the Gulf of St Vincent.
Next day we were hiking again, this time a 2 ½ hr stint in the Morialta Gorge and on an even hotter day! We walked and sweated round the rim of the escarpment, with lots of scuttles and rustles to accompany us, as little tawny dragon lizards and small skinks darted for cover under leaf litter. From various lookout points there were some rather outstanding views of the gorge and its towering cliffs, not to mention a pretty unique long-view of the gorge with the Adelaide coastline far beyond it.
And proving that perhaps we were not just gluttons but clearly also glutton for punishment, the nest day saw us doing a 30km cycle along the river Torrens, from its mouth at the coast, into Adelaide city and then back again. It was pretty weird to see the mouth of the river practically dry whilst other parts further on by comparison were full (and in one place bizarrely, had almost ridiculously vibrant green grass alongside it). A nice enough river to cycle along but sorry Adelaide, we had to agree, it just wasn’t a patch on the river cycle you can do in Perth!
Camp-notes –gorgeous surrounds; wet tent funny shenanigans; noisy nights, killer-seedpods and sleepy koalas!
One of the reasons we also extended our stay here is that the campsite is just gorgeous, set in a National Park that is only 15mins/7km to the CBD of Adelaide, 15mins to the Hills and even right next to a small suburb, but you would never know – its that tranquil and a world of its own. The little thoroughfare that everyone camps on is lined with beautiful Dutch Elms that are starting to turn colour and once the nice weather returned, it has been just so relaxing to sit underneath them and listen to them rustle during the afternoon. We have ducks walking around us, a few wild koalas and of course, heaps of birds!
After 4 days or so of it, I am so over the rain – it is noisy, it is wet and I am not in control of when it stops lol! It created quite a farce too on the second day, when the first main torrential downpour took us quite by surprise. You see, due to the nature of the site we were given, our front annexe had to be pitched on a slight incline which meant that in the downpour that then followed, the rain started to not only run back and pool rather weightily on the roof in a couple of places not but also create rivulets all over the annexe floor as it came through the mesh walls! Funny scenes of course ensued with me inside and getting wet through the mesh as I tried to not only adjust the slope of the roof by adjusting the height of a couple of the poles, but also kept jumping up to the roof with arms high in the air to try and bounce the pooling water up and off it…..big sheets of it would then crash down the side mesh-wall and soak me some more on the way down not to mention drench Gordon, who unluckily was in the wrong place at the wrong time on the outside! Out there, he was just clanging away on the tent pegs with his hammer as he adjusted guy ropes and tried to put up a couple of tarps to keep the rain out! By the end of it you should have seen the state of both the pair of us (Gordon was a complete drowned rat) and the state of the tent floor, which by the end of it all was covered in the muddy wet towels and tea shirts I had used to do a mop-up job!!. And they say South Australia is hot and dry?????????????
Not content with featuring during the day, the rain has also had a starring role at night too and has played a definite part in the noisy nights I have had so far at this campsite! Torrential downpours in the middle of the night were on the agenda again for the next 3 nights of our stay and it really does make quite a racket when you are under canvas under a large tree! The pattern was a familiar one - I either went to bed or woke up to the sounds of leaves mega-rustling and the soft and gentle pitter-patter of rain on the canvas roof. An ominous sign! That pitter-patter quickly became like pins, which, as the raindrops ominously fattened, then gave way to random bubble-wrap “popping” sounds and a weather-front that seemed to mean business. Sure enough, after this everything just seemed to intensify, as if a huge giant were playing with a big vat of rusty old nails, pouring them in a continuous stream onto our tent from a great height. On each occasion of course, Gordon was fast asleep (!) and just as I was still wondering how our tent could stay water-tight, the volume of the downpour cranked up a notch or two in line with the pounding pace of the drenching, until it reached deafening proportions, stopped even sounding like rain and started sounding more like static or the loud crackling of an old gramophone player! And then, quite abruptly, it would all stop - just like that – and we would go back to the bubblewrap “popping” sounds on the roof as the leaves of the tree above us loosened their load and from there, back to pitter patter – before the whole cycle would kick off all over again……and again….. and again!!! Perhaps by about the third night, when I realized our bedroom tent WAS watertight after all, I started to like the sound of it all more – after all, I was incredibly snug and warm on my sheepskin underlay and with my duvet and blankets over me!
But I can’t blame just the rain for my disturbed nights here either - we have also had noisy nights due to the sounds of the Barking Owl (yep, VERY funny that one and truly does sound like a dog yapping!) and a resident magpie that insists on doing a monotonous and repetitive call for half an hour in the early hours of the morning! Plus of course I must give the wild native koalas a mention, which come in during the night from other areas of the National Park and settle in the gum trees here. They either growl (rather like a dog that has a bone and he doesn’t want you to go near it) or make a grunting sound which is almost like a ‘bearing down” (as if they really are having a s**t!!!) Paradoxically, this bearing down and grunting sounds remarkably like snoring too – very, very cute!. (And they’re even cuter when you spot them the next day, up a tree near your tent, either fast asleep or trying very hard to keep their eyelids open (as are WE after all their bloody night-time noise!).
After quite a bit of disturbed sleep you can therefore imagine how startling it is, to be then rudely awoken in the morning for good measure by the sound of killer-seedpods from the tree we are camped under! Not content with hurling their missiles on Gordon’s head during the day (very funny! Not quite a direct hit yet but I am hopeful, lol!), they then catapult themselves off the tree first thing in the morning before even the Kookaburras can get a look in with their raucous wake-up call! It really does make you jump out of your skin and it sounds like a person is hurling things deliberately at us, such is the force of impact from these bloody things!
So are the Hills a contender for us to settle in when we are done with traveling?
Well, it is certainly heaps cheaper to indulge in the wineries and food here than say at Swan Valley in Perth or Margaret River wine region in south west W.A and, though we weren’t there at the right time to catch the growers markets etc, we know that the Hills have stacks more than Perth! The sheer range of pubs, markets and regional gourmet and biodynamic/organic produce really does blow Perth out of the water, so we give it all top marks there too! Alas there are no sunsets over water and it gets bloody chilly and grim in winter but sadly never cold enough for snow (unlike some other parts of Oz we have our eyes on). And yet…… the proximity of the Hills to the huge environmental diversity of S.A makes for a very compelling reason to move here. Mmmmmm – watch this space, though I suspect NSW will be a tough competitor later on!
And that, my friends, has been the Adelaide Hills! Bon Apetit!
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Post 6 - Greetings From Coffin Bay - Journal
Greetings from Coffin Bay on the Eyre Peninsula, S.A!
We have been here now for 4 days with a couple of those being beautiful weather too, though again as I type (and we are due to do a part set-down later tonight so we can get an early departure tomorrow) it is raining gently again– agggh!!! When we arrived though, it was a hot, hot day on its way out and the bay looked gorgeous with its calm, tranquil and pristine waters lapping onto the lovely esplanade foreshore as rugged islands loomed black/grey in the distance on the horizon. Trust me, after all the wind and rain we have had, it looked like paradise! Oh – and NO mozzies here, yay! So, we have enjoyed our stay here mixing some of our favourite pastimes of eating and being active, with some leisurely pottering too.
Fish-tastic!
The whole Eyre Peninsula is famed for its huge abundance, variety and quality of fish, so needless to say, the foodie highlights here have been much more to do with our water-baby friends than anywhere else so far on our trip. Coffin Bay itself is world famous for its oysters which it grows right here in the bay, so we christened our arrival night by dining at the local Oysterbeds restaurant and were not disappointed at all. I have never really been into oysters up until we came here but I have to say, I could have happily gorged on a few more all to myself, they were that yummilicious - both as Manhattan style and also panko-crumbed with wild cranberries! Gordon went on to have the most succulent marron (for the Pommies, that’s a freshwater crayfish which is a bit like a lobster) and I feasted on juicy seared kingfish – all accompanied of course by a couple of bottles of some rather moreish “Nepenthe” sauvignon blanc from the Adelaide Hills. Well, why else are we traveling round Australia????!
Finally christened my kayak!
We’ve been doing our training plus getting out around the bay and surrounding bush doing some walking and yesterday also took our kayaks to part of the rather large national park here that takes up the Oceanside of the bay…..there we enjoyed some 90mins of kayaking round the inlet of Yangie Bay. It was fantastic - just me and Gordon out there on deep blue gorgeous waters, kayaking round little islands full of cormorants, with big Australian Salmon jumping out of the water around our kayaks as we went, and wonderful chance sightings of wild kangaroos with their joeys feeding where the rocks met the waters edge. The latter sightings were mainly on the way back, which must have made for a bit of a comic scene as I struggled all at the same time to keep kayak in place (when the wind had its own plans!), steady my paddle across my lap without letting it fall in the water, keep the arm of my sunglasses in my mouth so they also didn’t drop in the water AND try to locate said kangaroos in the viewfinder of the binoculars whilst trying to focus these at the same time! Too hard lol!! After kayaking we did some driving out to a couple of lookouts across to huge sand-dunes and rugged limestone-cliffs coastline but again, the great Southern Ocean being what it is, the wind got the better of us and we retreated back to camp!
Other than all this we have simply been enjoying Coffin Bay itself – for Gordon that was fishing (had to laugh – on a peninsula famous for its abundance of fish, he returned home announcing it was sausages for tea! Which makes me wonder…..did he REALLY catch that bream in Denmark……hmmmmm!). For me, enjoying the bay has been about morning trips down to one of the jetty’s and getting lost in trance looking into the water again– the other morning, while I had left Gordon to make breakfast (!), I went down to said jetty to be rewarded with a stunning sky and chance sighting of a beautiful stingray swimming through the pristine shallow water – wow, just beautiful!
Coffin Bay camp-notes – bloody noisy birds, things going “boing” in the night, complimentary manure spreading and great people!
So we pretty much struck gold with this camping ground as it is yards from the beautiful bay, with large sites and hardly anybody here – my kind of place!! If you had to list a downside (other than the fact that they had a rather annoying policy of issuing a toilet key which I lost on numerous occasions and normally in the middle of the night!), then it would undoubtedly be the noisy mornings in particular when at least 200-300 galahs and lorikeet parrots fly in from god knows where and land in the central tree here in particular but all trees generally! They come like clockwork at about 7.30a.m and the charade repeats itself every night before sunset until a short while after. My God, now I am a bird-lover it is true but this is pushing the envelope! And once the big black crows join the party you are lying there in bed with your head veritably spinning to the sheer cacophony of noise they produce, the volume is absolutely incredible and there’s no way you could actually get back to sleep even if you wanted to! So, that’s the birds - during the night though you get other wildlife encounters in the shape of around 15-20 kangaroos and their joeys eating what little grass is left in the caravan park (S.A has practically no grass anywhere due to the drought). There I am lying in bed and I hear them round our tent, hopping about as if on pogo sticks and vibrating the floor with their “boing boing” thuds as they pass, its quite amusing indeed and even more so to watch their blackened silhouettes hard at it out of the bed window. Of course in the morning as you step out of your tent they have spread huge amounts of complimentary manure for you to enjoy gazing upon while you eat breakfast, which leads one to the only obvious assumption that it must have been coming out one end just as fast as it was being fed into the other lol! Other than the resident wildlife for entertainment, we have also had a couple of great nights with fellow travelers. ‘Ebay” Don was an intriguing musician and so named due to his penchant for miserly travel - he gave us many a tip on how not to spend money at all while traveling and made us laugh quite a bit with that. Over a very quaffable bottle of Shiraz (that he had of course secured for a ridiculous bargain price!), we had quite the philosophical chat into the night - about travel, being on the road, freedom and getting back to a more simpler way of life. Then we had a brilliant night with Roger and Tricia from Gippsland in Victoria, who have practically backpacked round every nook and cranny of this world and this, combined with the fact that they are absolute adrenalin junkies with a dry and droll sense of humour, ensured a night of much hilarious storytelling and for the first time ever, of Caroline and Gordon being part of the noisemakers in a caravan park!! They were a great couple though and we have exchanged contact details as may well cross paths again when in Exmouth a few weeks from now.
And so that, my friends, was Coffin Bay!
We have been here now for 4 days with a couple of those being beautiful weather too, though again as I type (and we are due to do a part set-down later tonight so we can get an early departure tomorrow) it is raining gently again– agggh!!! When we arrived though, it was a hot, hot day on its way out and the bay looked gorgeous with its calm, tranquil and pristine waters lapping onto the lovely esplanade foreshore as rugged islands loomed black/grey in the distance on the horizon. Trust me, after all the wind and rain we have had, it looked like paradise! Oh – and NO mozzies here, yay! So, we have enjoyed our stay here mixing some of our favourite pastimes of eating and being active, with some leisurely pottering too.
Fish-tastic!
The whole Eyre Peninsula is famed for its huge abundance, variety and quality of fish, so needless to say, the foodie highlights here have been much more to do with our water-baby friends than anywhere else so far on our trip. Coffin Bay itself is world famous for its oysters which it grows right here in the bay, so we christened our arrival night by dining at the local Oysterbeds restaurant and were not disappointed at all. I have never really been into oysters up until we came here but I have to say, I could have happily gorged on a few more all to myself, they were that yummilicious - both as Manhattan style and also panko-crumbed with wild cranberries! Gordon went on to have the most succulent marron (for the Pommies, that’s a freshwater crayfish which is a bit like a lobster) and I feasted on juicy seared kingfish – all accompanied of course by a couple of bottles of some rather moreish “Nepenthe” sauvignon blanc from the Adelaide Hills. Well, why else are we traveling round Australia????!
Finally christened my kayak!
We’ve been doing our training plus getting out around the bay and surrounding bush doing some walking and yesterday also took our kayaks to part of the rather large national park here that takes up the Oceanside of the bay…..there we enjoyed some 90mins of kayaking round the inlet of Yangie Bay. It was fantastic - just me and Gordon out there on deep blue gorgeous waters, kayaking round little islands full of cormorants, with big Australian Salmon jumping out of the water around our kayaks as we went, and wonderful chance sightings of wild kangaroos with their joeys feeding where the rocks met the waters edge. The latter sightings were mainly on the way back, which must have made for a bit of a comic scene as I struggled all at the same time to keep kayak in place (when the wind had its own plans!), steady my paddle across my lap without letting it fall in the water, keep the arm of my sunglasses in my mouth so they also didn’t drop in the water AND try to locate said kangaroos in the viewfinder of the binoculars whilst trying to focus these at the same time! Too hard lol!! After kayaking we did some driving out to a couple of lookouts across to huge sand-dunes and rugged limestone-cliffs coastline but again, the great Southern Ocean being what it is, the wind got the better of us and we retreated back to camp!
Other than all this we have simply been enjoying Coffin Bay itself – for Gordon that was fishing (had to laugh – on a peninsula famous for its abundance of fish, he returned home announcing it was sausages for tea! Which makes me wonder…..did he REALLY catch that bream in Denmark……hmmmmm!). For me, enjoying the bay has been about morning trips down to one of the jetty’s and getting lost in trance looking into the water again– the other morning, while I had left Gordon to make breakfast (!), I went down to said jetty to be rewarded with a stunning sky and chance sighting of a beautiful stingray swimming through the pristine shallow water – wow, just beautiful!
Coffin Bay camp-notes – bloody noisy birds, things going “boing” in the night, complimentary manure spreading and great people!
So we pretty much struck gold with this camping ground as it is yards from the beautiful bay, with large sites and hardly anybody here – my kind of place!! If you had to list a downside (other than the fact that they had a rather annoying policy of issuing a toilet key which I lost on numerous occasions and normally in the middle of the night!), then it would undoubtedly be the noisy mornings in particular when at least 200-300 galahs and lorikeet parrots fly in from god knows where and land in the central tree here in particular but all trees generally! They come like clockwork at about 7.30a.m and the charade repeats itself every night before sunset until a short while after. My God, now I am a bird-lover it is true but this is pushing the envelope! And once the big black crows join the party you are lying there in bed with your head veritably spinning to the sheer cacophony of noise they produce, the volume is absolutely incredible and there’s no way you could actually get back to sleep even if you wanted to! So, that’s the birds - during the night though you get other wildlife encounters in the shape of around 15-20 kangaroos and their joeys eating what little grass is left in the caravan park (S.A has practically no grass anywhere due to the drought). There I am lying in bed and I hear them round our tent, hopping about as if on pogo sticks and vibrating the floor with their “boing boing” thuds as they pass, its quite amusing indeed and even more so to watch their blackened silhouettes hard at it out of the bed window. Of course in the morning as you step out of your tent they have spread huge amounts of complimentary manure for you to enjoy gazing upon while you eat breakfast, which leads one to the only obvious assumption that it must have been coming out one end just as fast as it was being fed into the other lol! Other than the resident wildlife for entertainment, we have also had a couple of great nights with fellow travelers. ‘Ebay” Don was an intriguing musician and so named due to his penchant for miserly travel - he gave us many a tip on how not to spend money at all while traveling and made us laugh quite a bit with that. Over a very quaffable bottle of Shiraz (that he had of course secured for a ridiculous bargain price!), we had quite the philosophical chat into the night - about travel, being on the road, freedom and getting back to a more simpler way of life. Then we had a brilliant night with Roger and Tricia from Gippsland in Victoria, who have practically backpacked round every nook and cranny of this world and this, combined with the fact that they are absolute adrenalin junkies with a dry and droll sense of humour, ensured a night of much hilarious storytelling and for the first time ever, of Caroline and Gordon being part of the noisemakers in a caravan park!! They were a great couple though and we have exchanged contact details as may well cross paths again when in Exmouth a few weeks from now.
And so that, my friends, was Coffin Bay!
Post 5 - Crossing The Nullabor - Journal
Crossing the Nullabor
They say that to cross the Nullabor (a.k.a. “the black ribbon highway”) is to do one of the world’s great road journeys across one of the most unique tracts of un-spoilt wilderness on the face of the planet. It’s true we may have a slightly different way to tell the story (!) but we are still glad we did the trip – and anyway, we kind of had to, as it’s the easiest way to drive from W.A across into S.A!
A tale of weird moonscapes……
It took us just 2 days of 8-9 hours driving each day, to cross 3 time-zones and one quarantine check and thereby complete the full 1200km/720mile single-lane highway route. (I guess for our Pommie readers, that’s roughly the equivalent of driving from Lands End to John O’Groates but add on an extra 300km/180miles!) Even more mind-boggling when you think about it, is that the highway itself cuts through what is actually a whopping 2.8 million hectares/6million acres of semi-arid moonscape desert - and yet also runs parallel to the 60m-high sheer limestone cliffs, rugged coastline and snow-white dunes of the Great Australian Bight. That said though, you only really hug that coastline more closely towards the latter end of the journey – up until then, its an unending and unbroken 360 degree horizon of low-lying saltbush and bluebush, with the occasional tablelands or grasslands, forest, a vast salt-lake or two or granite outcrops to break up the absolute monotony of the whole thing. And if I haven’t managed to convince you yet as to just what an impressively weird moonscape kind of place it really is… how about the fact that it is used to be the ocean floor and now is the world’s biggest and flattest single piece of limestone….that under that limestone is the world’s biggest cave landscape……that onto that limestone in 1979, Australia’s biggest meteorite came crashing down, weighing in at a hefty 10 tonnes….or that over that limestone runs Australia’s longest stretch of “straight-road” driving - a.k.a. “the 90mile straight” (so, roughly the equivalent of driving from London to Birmingham with nothing but a straight road forever in front of you, not a single bend or curve – and, one could argue, an even bleaker landscape than the Nullabor lol!!)
Lots of trance…..
Anyway, you would think that doing a drive like that was insanely boring and bottom-numbing and that the passenger would spend most of it fast asleep - but I have to say that it actually wasn’t and the passenger didn’t snooze often, which I guess all up was a bit of a surprise – as was the fact that we only listened to a couple of CD’s the whole way! Not quite sure therefore what we did actually do outside of heaps of chats, pee stops, photo stops and fuel stops! I reckon we were in trance a good chunk of the way and I have always loved that about long drives…..you just go into your little world and time just seems to pass somehow!
Interesting weather ……
We did however have some pretty spectacular weather to keep us company on our journey – all to do with the cyclone that had happened in Northern Territory some days before apparently. Our departure day in W.A started therefore with an initial thunderclap that ripped us unceremoniously from our sleep at 6.30a.m on the day we were due to leave Esperance. Quite funny really as we just yanked our eyes open, said simultaneously “the tent!” and then bolted out of bed to pack the rig down ahead of the impending downpour – unfortunately by the time the tent was only 2/3rds packed away the storm beat us to it, only to laugh at us two minutes later when we had finished, by deciding to finish too! Annoying yes, but thank God we only had the bedroom tent to set down and that we had a tarp to keep our bed dry when packing the rig away wet! Plus I guess you could also say that at least this no longer made us ‘virgins” in the “having to set the rig down in the rain” category – now we were completely bona-fide true campertrailer-ites! And as it turned out, it was still the right thing to do as just one hour later, while we were actually pulling out of Esperance, the greyest and grimmest heavens just seemed to ‘Open Sesame” and hurl some impressive rain, lightning and thunder our way. Pretty much for the rest of that day we were trying to out-drive this same weather-front that seemed hell-bent on catching us back up!
More interesting weather - and naked shenanigans…..
By the time we reached our overnight roadhouse stop some 9 hours later at Cocklebiddy, the rain was no more but the winds were very blustery – the silver lining being, that at least the bloody flies just whizzed straight past me and kept going! Camping on bitumen by the road as we had to, we obviously couldn’t use tent pegs, so Gordon quite rightly guy-roped some pretty big lumps of granite to the side of the tent most exposed to the brunt of the weather, figuring that ought to keep us in place etc. Later on as he fell asleep and I stayed awake (yes, I am such a trusting soul!!), I looked out of the window at some pretty scary and very rapid lightening indeed – lightening that was close enough to hurt your eyes with its brightness yet far away to conceal the thunder. “It won’t come our way” had been Gordon’s last words….and I am sat there watching it get bigger and brighter, hearing the wind getting up some more, thinking “yeah right!”, plus worrying about bushfires and thinking “shit - there’s only one exit road out of here and it’s going to take 9 hours to escape down it!”. Anyway, either I got bored of waiting for my “yeah right” to come true or sleep got the better of me - because the next thing I know is I woke up in the middle of the night to the sounds of thunder and the strangely unnerving physical sensations of our bedroom tent seeming to want to hurl itself off the face of the Nullabor! Now of course, our bedroom tent can’t actually DO that as its attached to the bloody trailer but yours truly wasn’t believing any of that and as I switched on the light and saw the floor literally lifting up and the OTHER side of the tent buffeting inwards (complete with one of the inner frame poles dislodged)……well then it was a sharp dig in the ribs for a sleeping and therefore blissfully unaware Gordon! Yep, the wind had bloody changed direction in the night and the tail-end of the storm had indeed come our way! What then ensued was more comical than words will be able to do justice on this blog but, in short, Gordon was indeed yanked awake by yours truly and, stark b…..ck naked as he was, had to climb down a bed-ladder that was being simultaneously lifted up to the ceiling by the rising floor (lol!), then strike unintended yet very amusing poses as he boxed with the buffeting wind from the inside of the tent while ALL things dangled (ahem!) (including the bloody pole-frame he was trying to fix back in place)….and THEN go outside in said wind and rain to change the granite guy-ropes to the other side! Hilarious!!! (ooops sorry, I mean, poor bugger!) . Enough said – we didn’t get a great night’s sleep that night!
They say that to cross the Nullabor (a.k.a. “the black ribbon highway”) is to do one of the world’s great road journeys across one of the most unique tracts of un-spoilt wilderness on the face of the planet. It’s true we may have a slightly different way to tell the story (!) but we are still glad we did the trip – and anyway, we kind of had to, as it’s the easiest way to drive from W.A across into S.A!
A tale of weird moonscapes……
It took us just 2 days of 8-9 hours driving each day, to cross 3 time-zones and one quarantine check and thereby complete the full 1200km/720mile single-lane highway route. (I guess for our Pommie readers, that’s roughly the equivalent of driving from Lands End to John O’Groates but add on an extra 300km/180miles!) Even more mind-boggling when you think about it, is that the highway itself cuts through what is actually a whopping 2.8 million hectares/6million acres of semi-arid moonscape desert - and yet also runs parallel to the 60m-high sheer limestone cliffs, rugged coastline and snow-white dunes of the Great Australian Bight. That said though, you only really hug that coastline more closely towards the latter end of the journey – up until then, its an unending and unbroken 360 degree horizon of low-lying saltbush and bluebush, with the occasional tablelands or grasslands, forest, a vast salt-lake or two or granite outcrops to break up the absolute monotony of the whole thing. And if I haven’t managed to convince you yet as to just what an impressively weird moonscape kind of place it really is… how about the fact that it is used to be the ocean floor and now is the world’s biggest and flattest single piece of limestone….that under that limestone is the world’s biggest cave landscape……that onto that limestone in 1979, Australia’s biggest meteorite came crashing down, weighing in at a hefty 10 tonnes….or that over that limestone runs Australia’s longest stretch of “straight-road” driving - a.k.a. “the 90mile straight” (so, roughly the equivalent of driving from London to Birmingham with nothing but a straight road forever in front of you, not a single bend or curve – and, one could argue, an even bleaker landscape than the Nullabor lol!!)
Lots of trance…..
Anyway, you would think that doing a drive like that was insanely boring and bottom-numbing and that the passenger would spend most of it fast asleep - but I have to say that it actually wasn’t and the passenger didn’t snooze often, which I guess all up was a bit of a surprise – as was the fact that we only listened to a couple of CD’s the whole way! Not quite sure therefore what we did actually do outside of heaps of chats, pee stops, photo stops and fuel stops! I reckon we were in trance a good chunk of the way and I have always loved that about long drives…..you just go into your little world and time just seems to pass somehow!
Interesting weather ……
We did however have some pretty spectacular weather to keep us company on our journey – all to do with the cyclone that had happened in Northern Territory some days before apparently. Our departure day in W.A started therefore with an initial thunderclap that ripped us unceremoniously from our sleep at 6.30a.m on the day we were due to leave Esperance. Quite funny really as we just yanked our eyes open, said simultaneously “the tent!” and then bolted out of bed to pack the rig down ahead of the impending downpour – unfortunately by the time the tent was only 2/3rds packed away the storm beat us to it, only to laugh at us two minutes later when we had finished, by deciding to finish too! Annoying yes, but thank God we only had the bedroom tent to set down and that we had a tarp to keep our bed dry when packing the rig away wet! Plus I guess you could also say that at least this no longer made us ‘virgins” in the “having to set the rig down in the rain” category – now we were completely bona-fide true campertrailer-ites! And as it turned out, it was still the right thing to do as just one hour later, while we were actually pulling out of Esperance, the greyest and grimmest heavens just seemed to ‘Open Sesame” and hurl some impressive rain, lightning and thunder our way. Pretty much for the rest of that day we were trying to out-drive this same weather-front that seemed hell-bent on catching us back up!
More interesting weather - and naked shenanigans…..
By the time we reached our overnight roadhouse stop some 9 hours later at Cocklebiddy, the rain was no more but the winds were very blustery – the silver lining being, that at least the bloody flies just whizzed straight past me and kept going! Camping on bitumen by the road as we had to, we obviously couldn’t use tent pegs, so Gordon quite rightly guy-roped some pretty big lumps of granite to the side of the tent most exposed to the brunt of the weather, figuring that ought to keep us in place etc. Later on as he fell asleep and I stayed awake (yes, I am such a trusting soul!!), I looked out of the window at some pretty scary and very rapid lightening indeed – lightening that was close enough to hurt your eyes with its brightness yet far away to conceal the thunder. “It won’t come our way” had been Gordon’s last words….and I am sat there watching it get bigger and brighter, hearing the wind getting up some more, thinking “yeah right!”, plus worrying about bushfires and thinking “shit - there’s only one exit road out of here and it’s going to take 9 hours to escape down it!”. Anyway, either I got bored of waiting for my “yeah right” to come true or sleep got the better of me - because the next thing I know is I woke up in the middle of the night to the sounds of thunder and the strangely unnerving physical sensations of our bedroom tent seeming to want to hurl itself off the face of the Nullabor! Now of course, our bedroom tent can’t actually DO that as its attached to the bloody trailer but yours truly wasn’t believing any of that and as I switched on the light and saw the floor literally lifting up and the OTHER side of the tent buffeting inwards (complete with one of the inner frame poles dislodged)……well then it was a sharp dig in the ribs for a sleeping and therefore blissfully unaware Gordon! Yep, the wind had bloody changed direction in the night and the tail-end of the storm had indeed come our way! What then ensued was more comical than words will be able to do justice on this blog but, in short, Gordon was indeed yanked awake by yours truly and, stark b…..ck naked as he was, had to climb down a bed-ladder that was being simultaneously lifted up to the ceiling by the rising floor (lol!), then strike unintended yet very amusing poses as he boxed with the buffeting wind from the inside of the tent while ALL things dangled (ahem!) (including the bloody pole-frame he was trying to fix back in place)….and THEN go outside in said wind and rain to change the granite guy-ropes to the other side! Hilarious!!! (ooops sorry, I mean, poor bugger!) . Enough said – we didn’t get a great night’s sleep that night!
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