Having travelled north through the Barossa Valley I now wanted to go back south and so as not to go back the same way I decided to travel east to reach the Murray river. The Barossa is separated from the Murray river plain by about 15 km of undulating hills which are at about 300m altitude. About 5kms before Sedan there is a last crest on the road as it leaves the hills and drops down to the Murray plain. The view from here is magnificent, you can see for miles and miles and miles in all directions.
Looking out onto the Murray plain
Sedan has a small population and a few old heritage-listed houses as well as a small supermarket where I stopped for a cup of tea. The shady veranda of the pub opposite looked very inviting, but I had another 30 km to go across some open country – an almost straight road with nothing in between. Once the train had come here, but little of its past importance remains.
Well, the Murray flats looked flat from the top of the hill and for a motorist they probably seem flat, but for a cyclist on a warm day they are not. Up and down, up and down, not by a lot, but enough to have to keep pedalling most of the time. At Swan Reach there is no bridge but there is a 24-hour free ferry service -as there is on all the Murray towns without a bridge . There aren’t many bridges on the river around here and the only one I know of is in a town called…Murray Bridge ! At all the other places ferries incessantly plough backwards and forwards across the river, which down here is quite wide.
Murray at Swan Reach
The Swan Reach caravan park is small and cheap and nearly empty and it’s right down by the river, so the first thing I did was to go for a swim – beautiful after that hard ride !The town’s one hotel in a beautiful setting overlooking the river had a very nice bistro where I was able to savour a lovely meal. It was Saturday night and the bar next door was getting very noisy. I stayed a while to listen to a few oldies – Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman” – then walked back to camp. This my third night “on the road” would be my first camping.
The following morning was lovely and sunny. I had just spent my first night in my new cocoon tent. Very light and very small – it
My lightweight tent
weighed only 1.1 kg which was the main reason I had bought it – once it was up I actually hunted around for a while to figure out how to get in. The poles and holes were colour-coded which I thought was a good idea, so it was straightforward to put up. After breakfast and packing up, the road heads back up to the level of the plain. The plain is about 30m above the river level and in some places there are spectacular cliffs. Today I was heading for Mannum, about 62 km down river.
Near Big Bend
Big Bend looking south
Along the way there were several lookouts where you get a magnificent view over the river valley. Along the way, particularly near the river, there are irrigated orchards.
Big Bend looking north
Elsewhere Malley scrub alternates with cleared, barren pasture. At about the halfway point, it was back across the river with a ferry at Walker’s Flat, a little oasis in this empty dry country. I had lunch down by the river near the ferry crossing under shady trees with ochre-coloured cliff-faces opposite.
I asked for the road to Mannum and was told “up the hill to the T-intersection then it’s downhill all the way”. I’d heard that sort of thing before, and coming from people used to going everywhere in cars, this had to be taken with a grain of salt. Motorists tend not to notice rolling slopes, they mostly remember big hills, either up or down. And so it was. The hill before the T-intersection was long and slow and about 10 km long – very hard going particularly with
Ferry at Walker's Flat showing 1956 flood level
a strong southerly blowing, a head wind for me. About 5 km further on there was a short steep downhill section – the hill that the motorist had remembered – then a longer flattish section into Mannum. These last 10 km or so were scenically the best, following the river at water level and going past wetlands. However the head wind had increased in intensity and pedalling, even on the flat, was becoming exhausting and very unpleasant. So I was relieved when around a bend I came into the town of Mannum, first riding opposite a bird sanctuary on the river side of the road, then along a lush green park. The Visitor’s Centre had just closed – it was Sunday – so I went to the caravan park to set up camp and go for a swim.
Busy ferry crossing at Mannum
The next morning I left the camping ground around 10 am and headed for the nearby Visitors Centre. It includes a museum covering the early years in the area, in particular the era of paddle steamers on the Murray. Near here is where the first such vessel was launched in 1846 and very soon the steamers provided all sorts of services up and down the river – passengers, postal, cargo, milk collection. One of the pioneers was William Randell, the great great grandfather of Alex in Nuriootpa ! She had told me about him a few days before. A renovated paddle steamer, the “Marion” built 1904, was on the wharf and does tours several times a month.
The "Marion" at Mannum
There is also a good 20 min documentary on the record 100-year flood of 1956. It was apparently of vast proportions mobilising the whole population for about 3 months, causing huge damage to the local economy which only recovered after a few years. During this time a lot of other things were going on elsewhere in Australia and the world – the Suez conflict, the Olympic Games in Melbourne – so the flood got little press coverage outside of South Australia and apparently not enough sympathy in Canberra. It may or may not be related, but even today in talking with people here, I think I’ve noticed a sense of identify of people with their state. The state’s livelihood depends a lot on this river and such disasters forge a sense of togetherness. They also know that the waters now causing massive flooding – again – in Queensland and NSW will all come down here within a few months and so they are preparing for high water. The Murray -Darling basin drains a huge area and the rainwater all eventually flows down to the mouth of the Murray. There are huge water management problems to deal with, look here for more discussion.
Like Nuriootpa, Mannum has a library with internet access where I spent an hour catching up on emails. Then I crossed the river and rode up the other side on the road to Murray Bridge. The weather was a bit cooler today but the wind had picked up, still a strong gusty headwind. So it was a long hard fight to get to Murray Bridge as it was all hills, constantly going up and down and the headwind forced me to pedal on the way down, so at no stage could I relax. The scenery was not much to look at either – mostly dry scrub. Signs warned of roadside broomrape invasion (a plant pest).
Murray Bridge has the only bridge over the Murray and it’s an old bridge, long and narrow, built in 1860 for all traffic, rail and road. A new bridge for the railroad was added around 1900. After lunch where I was disappointed to find that the German Bakery advertised in the brochure no longer existed, I stopped at the Visitors Centre to get some information about roads and camping grounds. For once, the advice about hills was almost
Wellington ferry crossing
completely right – no more hills once out of town. From here on it was a much more pleasant ride south towards Wellington on the Jervois rode. This is apparently another name of French origin, but here is pronounced Jervoize. The road wound lazily through pasture and dairy country with only the occasional rise at a very reasonable grade.
At Jervois there is another ferry linking it to Tailem Bend, another old town. I continued on the same side (western) for another 11 km to Wellington. The road goes almost exclusively through dairy country and as I was passing through around 5 pm, all the herds were standing around outside sheds waiting to be milked.
Wellington near where the Murray runs into Lake Alexandrina is a very small place today although in the 19th century it was a booming town due to the river trade. The caravan park is small and simple, again very few patrons and mine the only tent, but with a communal kitchen for making tea and charging the computer. There is a ferry across the river, the last one (or the first if you’re heading north).
I got away at 9.30 am and immediately liked the road – mostly flat – and with a cool cross-wind it was good riding. In contrast to yesterday, I made good time and reached Milang at lunch time having covered 45 km.
Long-abandoned shack
Initially it was cleared land, mostly scrub, with the odd dairy property. Now and then away from the road I noticed big oval-shaped reddish shallow ponds resembling evaporation pools – maybe something to do with a rising water table ? At Langhorne Creek the vineyards began, almost all the way down to the lake. They were harvesting and there were both tractors and trucks on the road carrying either empty or full bins. In the wine-growing areas I’m familiar with in Europe it’s usually a tractor towing one or two bins on a trailer to the local cooperative. Here it’s double semi-trailers carrying dozens and dozens of bins, sometimes to places very far away ! A lot of the vines were very old with massive trunks, being certainly over 100 years old.
Old vines at Langhorne Creek
Milang is a lovely little spot on the lake with piers and a tidy shore-front and many empty cabins obviously there for vacationers that had already left. There I met the first cyclist I had seen for 5 days – the only other ones I saw were on the first day, some sporty types going up to the Barossa. He was out for a day’s ride. A little later on I saw two more. But I never saw any touring cyclists. One of the ferry drivers told me a touring recumbent cyclist had passed through a month ago.
Written on the back on a van that passed me at a leisurely pace was “The minute you save in this world might put you 25 years ahead into the next”. It was written in big black capitals, I don’t know how they fitted all that in. A couple of probably cautious drivers seemed to be obediently following the van.
After Finnis the country became a bit hillier but nothing really worth mentioning. I arrived in Goolwa in time to book a Coorong tour for the following day. I had planned to do some kayaking with a guy recommended by Jim and Ruth, an ex-neighbour of theirs, but he wasn’t free on this Wednesday.
The Goolwa Tourist Park is at the top of town but it’s only a 10 min walk in to the centre. It has decent amenities, although the tent area is a bit neglected, and only cost $10. In all 4 caravan parks I’ve stayed at, mine has been the only tent. In Australia, caravan park is synonymous with camping ground. Most people either rent cabins or they have their van or caravan. Has camping, like people walking on footpaths, gone out of fashion ? On the other hand it could be argued that the real campers camp out in the bush or in National Parks where amenities are rudimentary or non-existent. But that means carrying food and water for several days, something I can’t do easily on the bike. In any case, the only thing I can say for sure is that there aren’t many touring cyclists. I didn’t encounter any in 8 days.
As I was going out on the Coorong adventure cruise, I packed up all my things and left them at the park office. I walked down to the wharf where the two boats “Spirit of Coorong” were waiting. There were about 25 people in each boat. We had a crew of two, Mike the skipper and main guide and Rick the purser. During the 6-hour trip we spent 4
Goolwa barrage
on the water going down past the mouth of the Murray and a further 2 on two short walks on the Younghusband Peninsula, in the Coorong National Park. One walk was to the surf beach to explain the cockle-shuffle. This is the traditional method of extracting cockles from the wet sand: you plant both feet in the sand and twist to and fro forcing the cockles to the surface. It sort of worked. On the way there and back we got some explanations of plants and food that the aborigines in this area used. Back at the boat, Rick had prepared (previously collected) cockled in white wine and cream and we were served hors d’oeuvres on the beach.
Vegetation on the Coorong
We had a tasty lunch on board and I appreciated the fact that no disposable plates or mugs were used, everything was real and got washed up at the end. The other walk was further along the peninsula, further south-east, at Cattle Point, where Mike took us to see an aboriginal midden about 5000 years old. It was very hot on the dunes, no shade anywhere, the sand seemed to have a magnifying effect.
The actual mouth of the Murray is not very large, maybe 50m wide, you could easily miss it and in fact Charles Sturt did on his famous expedition. It also moves around a lot over the years due to the huge amounts of shifting sands displaced by wind and water. It did actually close for a short time in 1971, reopening naturally after rains. During the drought in the last decade it only remained opened thanks to the continuous dredging of the channel leading up to it.
Our boat
All along the way there and back we saw many, many birds, pelicans, terns, ibis, heron, avocets, Cape Barren geese, cormorants and others whose names escape me, and I was able to put my binoculars to good use. The Goolwa barrage basically separates the freshwater flowing down the Murray from the saltwater coming in from the sea. Lake Alexandrina is primarily freshwater and is used for Adelaide’s water supply. When not enough water flows down the river, as was the case during drought years, the freshwater level sinks and the locks help keep out the sea water. This past year has seen a lot of flow partly due to flooding last year in Queensland and NSW and gates in the barrage must be opened accordingly. Our boat went through a lock here but the height difference was less than 50 cm.
Birds on the Coorong
Back at Goolwa I collected my bike and rode to nearby Port Elliot along a newly constructed bike path, although some of it followed existing roads. The Youth Hostel was booked out so I checked into the caravan park, one of the best so far and also the most expensive. The following day I rode back to Adelaide, firstly along some picturesque back roads to Willunga, then along the Shiraz/Coast to Vines railtrails.
On Coast to Vines trail looking south
End of the trip (sigh) at Noarlunga
During the trip I collected interesting or humorous bits and pieces read or seen in newspapers and books along the way. Here are some excerpts:
Concerning tax incentives to get people to live in the city, one person wrote to the paper “They can offer as many tax cuts as they like. You can’t put up a shed there. And a bloke needs his shed”.
While waiting for my meal in South Australia’s oldest country pub, the Wellington Hotel, I discovered in the March edition of Tailem Topics, the origin of the word bible – Basic Instruction Before Leaving Earth ! So now you know it too.
And here is an “adult” joke I came across that you can tell to just about anybody:
Husband – Honey, ah…what if we tried changing positions tonight ?
Wife – Sure, you go over to the ironing board and I’ll sit on the couch, drink beer and fart.
Here is the google map of the trip, if it doesn’t show up, as will sometimes happen, below is the non-interactive one.
Map of bike trip SA March 2012
