Fleurieu Peninsula to Portland

 We've been cruising along the coast the last week or so and life, as usual, has been pretty spot on perfect. We headed from Adelaide down the Fleurieu peninsula across a car ferry and into the coorong national park then down the coast from there until we crossed the SA border into Victoria.

 We've spent most of our time at the beach, I've been attempting to spearfish at the various spots down the coast. They've been a bit rubbish though, it seems like all south Australias water is shallow and sandy, and only really good for trolling along for flatheads (which I've been doing). It is also FREEZING COLD.

On our way down the coast we took a brief detour inland to visit mount Gambier. The original idea behind this trip was firstly to have an awesome holiday, but also to scope out potential paradises to move to in the country in the future.
 Mount Gambier is one of those I reckon, it's near the coast and has some really cool stuff around it. The whole town is built on a network of limestone caves (only discovered relatively recently). There are a couple of sinkholes in the town, where caves have collapsed and in these they've planted some beautiful gardens. Also at the top of mount gambier in the volcanic hollow there are some beautiful lakes. The nicest one (blue lake) is also the towns drinking water supply. The only problem with mount Gambier is it is way too cold...

 Nearby there are also a few limestone 'cave in' ponds with crystal clear (and freezing) water you can snorkel in.

 Here's some photo's;

 

 Horse and cart on the bridge out to granite island at victor harbour. There's a penguin colony out at the island, and for $6 you can visit the rescue penguins on the island which are pretty cool. What was more interesting than the penguins though was the volunteer tour lady, she spelled out all the penguins personalities and behaviour and went into which penguins had cheated on their husbands and gone off to live in other burrows etc... She was very funny, it was a great thing to do when you retire. She was spot on about the penguins too.

Robe obelisk and headland - A very nice town

Umpherston Sinkhole Mount Gambier - Originally made into a garden by a rich man in the 1900's it was left to grow over after he died, the nearby sawmill's social club gardened it back into this and it looks amazing. If you sit here in the evening possums will come out and eat fruit out of your hand.

 Caves under Mount Gambier township. We took the guided tour of the caves, it was so bad, there were only two caves you could walk into, the rest were underwater, and they were lame, but not as bad as the tour guy who talked like he was reading off a sheet of paper the whole time. It was depressing listening to him. There were some Chinese tourists with us on the tour, I was embarrassed to be Australian.

 Rachael on Ewens Pond - I only managed to squeeze off a couple of photo's before the camera ran out of battery, it was a nice spot, but freezing.

 

 Piccaninnie Pond - You wouldn't think it, but under the surface here is a chasm in the limestone which goes down 135 metres!!!! It just looks like a little pond. It was very very cool. (but freezing). During the snorkel there were some cool birds diving under and swimming down pretty deep, they were impressive to watch.

Here's another shot of Rachael over Piccaninnie Pond this time. I took my depth gauge with me to snorkel this and see how far down I could get. This shot was at about 15 metres deep, I managed to get down to 24.5 metres, and I'm pretty sure I could have got up near 30, but it was too scary going down into the chasm, in fresh water you sink really easily, and after about 15 metres you start falling really fast. That coupled with the fact that the bottom is another 120 metres down I didn't want to take any risks and push too hard. It also started to get pretty dark further in and I didn't bring a dive light. It was spooky going into the chasm, but very cool.

Freediving into the abyss at picaninnie ponds - Rachael tried getting a shot deeper but there's not enough light

Coming back out of the chasm

That is everything. Right now we're in Portland, which is a nice town in victoria (victoria's first town apparently) tomorrow we're gonna head out to the largest fur seal colony in Australia and to a petrified forest, and I'm gonna spear fish an old shipwreck which is just off the coast (if I can find it).

 As far as the lemon is concerned, she's ripping as always. I get the feeling we're using more gas than normal, so we're writing down the K's till the next fill, it might just be that it's hilly country and we're making a lot of detours. We'll see.

 As far as the bike is concerned the pre-ignition problem is finally solved. I cleaned the carburetor out including the jet needle and now it is running quite rich. I think maybe something was clogging the jet needle and it wasn't getting enough fuel. It's running fine now, thank god, I didn't want to have to buy a third bike..

South Australia

 So we've done a lot, and not updated the blog at all. The usual really....

 There is way too much to write about, we've crossed the Nullarbor, which was a pleasant drive, we went down the Eyre peninsula and then headed up to the Flinders Ranges, which were AMAZING, then down to Adelaide for a few days, which is a really nice city.

 Here's our trip so far summarised in photo form...

The trip across the Nullarbor - on the way we stopped at Eucla, there was an old abandoned telegraph station there which had to be abandoned because of all the sand building up and burying it.

 This was because of the rabbit plague back then. Rabbits don't seem like a massive issue now, but I think back then they came through in plague numbers and ate all the small plants causing winds to bury this place 

Blue Swimmer crab from the Eyre Peninsula - There are thousands of them - the Eyre isn't very good for spearfishing, it is just sandy shallows, I did spear a flathead after trolling along the sand for ages, but thats all you'll get around there. Prawning at night was ok though and I got this crab as well on an evening prawning.

 On the way through the flinders ranges we passed through a town called Hawker. There there's an artist who has painted a massive panorama of the Wilpena Pound mountains. It was amazing, almost as good as the real thing, it took him 4000 hours (13 months) to paint the massive circular picture, it was in a special room and you had to go up stairs to a viewing platform to see it. you can read about it at www.wilpenapanorama.com/

When we got to Flinders Ranges National Park we took the longer (9 hour apparently) walk to the Saint Mary's peak summit. It took 6 hours all up and the view was amazing. The olympus didn't do it justice at all though, so here's an aerial photo of wilpena pound. The highest bit is Saint Mary's peak. The mountain range here was a 'pound' which worked to keep sheep in for a farm which was in there. It was so cool

 

Mother Emu taking the kids for a walk - In the background are the beautiful Flinders Ranges - There were more emu's in the Flinders ranges than I've seen anywhere else. You literally couldn't walk or drive more than 2Km without seeing another group of emu's. We almost hit one in the bus which ran out in front of us from some bushes. Luckily the new brakes are bonza so we (just) missed it. The crockery and crap inside the bus wasn't too happy about it though

 Rachael and I after walking up Saint Mary's Peak, It was an amazing 360 degree view but too big for a camera

 Dune Sliding using a chopping board - It was the only flat thing we had, It didn't work at all... I can't even remember where that was...

Tumby Bay horse and cart ride. This is a $10 horse and cart ride which goes for about an hour. It was so goddam boring, the old guy doing it just went around town pointing out houses of people he knew. So crap... I want my $10 back

 Yellow footed rock wallaby in the Flinders ranges - I really wanted to see one of these, and we got lucky on a walk outside of the Flinders National park. These are cool wallabies, if you zoom in you can see the tail has a great tiger stripe thing going on

Some Gorge Somewhere

Adelaide Bus network - I don't know if I haven't been catching enough buses in cities but I thought this was way cool, a lot of the buses in Adelaide have little wheels coming out the sides from their front wheels. This lets them drive up onto bus tracks which go along for ages and steer the bus inside the little concrete gutter thing. They scream along these and once they get where they want to be they can just cruise off a ramp and drive around the city like a normal bus.

Thats pretty brief, but whatever.

 As far as the lemon is concerned there was a mystery creature eating holes in our fruit and vegetables. Rachael was adamant it was a bug or something, I was certain it was a mouse. After setting a mouse trap it only took a few hours to catch the culprit.

 I have no idea how it got in, it must have climbed up one of the wheels... It's good we got it though, they can destroy your wiring if you don't catch them soon.

  Otherwise the bus is great as usual, just a few stone chips which I've had to spray paint over, otherwise its great, the new muffler has made it a lot quieter which is nice.

 The bike on the other hand needed a new head gasket. After replacing the head gasket it is still making a tapping/ticking noise when the engine warms up. I was hoping it was just the tappets, but this is a classic sign of preignition, which will destroy another head gasket if we don't fix it soon. I'm fairly certain now that it's not due to the mix being too lean (I've made it as rich as possible and it still makes the noise), so Its either there's some carbon deposits in the engine causing a second spark, or maybe oil isn't flowing around the engine properly (blocked somewhere) and it is getting too hot for this reason. I'll try cleaning the air filter, and spraying carbon cleanser junk in while its running and see if that helps...