February 14 - The Eyre Peninsula, Port Lincoln, Australia

Today we arrived in Port Lincoln, a city on the Eyre Peninsula in the state of South Australia.  The population is around 16,000 and at one time it was considered making this city the capital of the state.  Instead Adelaide which is about 170 miles away was chosen because it was thought that Port Lincoln wouldn’t have sufficient water supplies to support a large population.

I booked a tour today that took me out of the town to a privately owned nature preserve called Whalers’ Way.   This place was a whaling station back in the 19th century and remains of the huts and hearths on which the whalers rendered the blubber can still be seen on the beach. 

We set out in a vehicle that was part bus and part heavy duty truck because the road we drove on was pretty bad.  On the dock next to us was a grain freighter loading up via a huge green conveyor belt and right outside the port area were huge grain storage tanks. As we drove out of the little town we passed some farms with cattle and sheep. In the sheep pastures there were some alpacas which are used to protect the sheep from predators, in this case a kind of red fox.  I know in Virginia there are some sheep farms where they use llamas and alpacas as guard “dogs” for the livestock because they can be quite protective of the flocks. 

The place we went is known for its stunning views of  cliffs and rocks.  The terrain is covered with scrubby bushes and I have no idea what they are called.  They look like the kind of things you see in our deserts.  The peninsula is largely made of limestone on top of basalt so the soil is very white and sandy looking.

In every place that we stopped we were on high cliffs overlooking a beautiful blue sea.  Our first lookout point was above Fishery Bay, a protected inlet with a magnificent white sand beach. There’s access to the beach from the entrance to the nature preserve.  There were a few people down there, but not many.  We next went to Cape Carnot on the southeastern tip of the peninsula.  There wasn’t a beach there. Instead there were splendid rock formations with waves crashing up on them and sea spray sometimes  flying up like a geyser into the air.  This whole area was explored by the same Englishman (Flinders) and Frenchman (Baudin) who mapped Kangaroo Island.  The name Carnot was one Baudin picked.  

Fishery Bay

This and the next are at Cape Carnot

Our third stop was at Cape Wiles on the southwestern tip of the Eyre Peninsula.  Here too there were big rock formations and huge swells rolling in and spraying high above the cliffs as they hit the rocks.  Our guide Peter set out a little tea table here for us to break up our journey.  Finally we were on to our last stop, Theakstone’s Crevasse.  This is a very interesting geological feature. It’s a deep crack in the earth’s crust caused by  the erosion of the limestone by wind and water over millions of years. The crack is close to 45 feet deep and 30 feet wide. It’s really a testament to the forces of nature.

Cape Wiles

Waves breaking on Cape Wiles

Theakstone's Crevasse

That was our last viewpoint before our return to Port Lincoln and the ship.  It was a very different excursion because it focused totally on some awesome land and seascapes unlike anything I’d seen before.

At dinner tonight I did something I’ve never done before.  I had accepted an invitation to a hosted table but before they walked me over to the table I saw some people there I’d dined with before and whose company I really didn’t enjoy.  I made a u-turn and luckily for me and my friend Helga four lovely people from our trivia team were waiting to be seated and we joined them instead. I guess I’m just getting feistier as I age but I just couldn’t sit through another dinner with them.  Maybe some time I’ll tell you about them.  For now I need to end this because I’m behind by a couple of day and it’s a formal night so I really should try to get dressed up.  So, bye for now.