South Australia, November 2017, and I continue my ride around Eyre Peninsula. This time up the remote and rugged west coast, then return to Adelaide via “the top”.
Everyone I talk to raves about Coffin Bay, so when I left Port Lincoln I thought I’d give it a whirl in spite of the 40km detour. But to be honest it didn’t do much for me. I was intending to camp in the national park but the flies, lack of water, flies, lack of shade, flies, dry heat, flies, no access to the sea itself and… did I mention the flies??..well, that put paid to that idea, and I ended up in Coffin Bay at the town caravan park which is pretty ordinary too.
Sorry about that – zooming didn’t’ help with seeing those flies huh! Gotcha!
I did get to try a dozen of the famous Coffin Bay oysters though, and they lived up to their reputation – yummmmo! A large mob of emus wander freely around the town, which is rather quaint.
The next town along the west coast, Elliston, was for me just an overnighter after a long hard day in the saddle, even though I did have a stiff breeze behind me for a lot of it. Maybe the serious fly problem at every stop had a lot to do with me just keeping on moving on. I even got a serious job offer at one of my rest stops, from a local farmer who needed help bringing in the wheat harvest. I was going to get to drive the big airconditioned harvester!
The nice lady in the non-descript Port Elliston caravan park that’s tucked in between the grain terminal and the main road gave me a good deal on a nondescript cabin. The local nondescript Liberty Servo, run, it seems like most Servos are in Australia these days, by affable Indians, did me an OK Rogan Josh takeaway (but it was not a patch on the Whyalla Rogan Josh that I’ll remember for a long time). In fact, “non-descript” just about sums up Port Elliston. Except for the jetty at sunset. That was nice.
But then, 100km down the track from Elliston, came Venus Bay, the loveliest place on the whole of Eyre Peninsula, IMHO.
And I almost missed Venus Bay altogether too, since it is a few km off the main road and I didn’t want to repeat the Coffin Bay experiment. But the rather gruff publican at the Port Kenny pub waxed lyrical about it while I was chowing down on the steak sandwich and beer he provided, and so I back-tracked 20 boring kilometers in the bloody heat to take a look – and decided to stay… for 3 days in fact. It has a friendly caravan park peopled with friendly semi-permanent fisher-folk residents, right on the beach front with safe swimming, and I even tried my hand at fishing off the pier with a cheap collapsible toy fishing rod that I bought, and bagged a decent feed of King George whiting for half-a-dozen of my fellow caravan parketeers within a few hours.
Streaky Bay was next, and an easy ride (flat, cool and no wind) of 98km, with a diversion to Murphy’s Haystacks on the way.
My MSR tent proved its mettle during the first night in Streaky Bay when a ferocious storm came through at midnight for 2 hours that took out a few of the caravanners’ annexes. The tent shook something terrible, but stayed dry and intact. It rained off and on for my 2 days in Streaky Bay, but the time was well spent in finally coming to grips with Blue Host and WordPress, including helpline sessions, to finally get this blog going.
Then came the big decision that I had studiously been avoiding to make, and ended up making on the spur of the moment, and that was whether to continue riding on up the peninsula coastline to Ceduna and then maybe go on cross the Nullarbor all the way to Perth, or chuck a right instead, and head back to Port Augusta and Adelaide via the ‘top’ of the peninsula? At the road junction, 10km north of Streaky Bay, I found myself going right. Meh – the forecast was for wind in my face the whole way across the Nullarbor anyway.
I made a long day of it from Streaky Bay to Wudinna (152km) in cool conditions with a slight crosswind, charging up at Poochera (in the roadhouse) and at Minnipa using the generator.
But hey! This was my first day of riding without padded bicycle shorts, and it went off rather well. Say no more. The kids in the photo above didn’t seem too distraught that one of their bikes flew off the back of their campervan and lay smashed against that tree in the background.
-ends-
November 2017. Eyre Peninsula in summary
Eyre Peninsula in summary, then? These seven following photos just about sum it up:
