Letho's Blog

April 04, 2011

We woke up in the LandCruiser near Cowell very .. very .. very early. What do you do when probably everyone else is asleep? Right, you head back to Lucky Bay and stroll along a 4WD tourist drive!

Well, it wasn’t that hard. A bit of soft sand. We would face some real hard obstacles a few days later .. after a bit of shaking we drove back to Cowell and prepared breakfast.

Not bad, eh? Yummy bacon and an original Australian Easter Bilby – they probably where short of bunnies? Don’t worry, it was made out of chocolate. Meanwhile we could watch a lot of oyster fishers and their trawlers arrive and depart from the nearby boat ramp. Indeed the whole of the Eyre Peninsula is just crazy about fishing – be it salmon, oysters or anything swimming in the sea.

Next stop was Arno Bay. Here we finally got to do a few walks again, e.g. the Mangrove Boardwalk which is designed to showcase the diverse and pristine beauty of the Arno Bay Estuary and its Mangrove habitats. We went to the beach as well, finding again surprisingly massive amounts of seaweed ..

After that we stopped at Tumby Bay. Yes, another bay. It’s unbelievable how many beautiful bays lie next to each other on this peninsula, perfect for swimming, surfing or fishing. Similarly unbelievable is the fact the Eyre Peninsula was not even mentioned in one of our travel guides – at all! Not a single page. What a shame ..

On our way to Port Lincoln in the Boston Bay we left out Port Neill and Louth Bay. Sorry, guys – maybe next time. The first short stop in Port Lincoln was the “Axel Stenross Maritime Museum“. However, we did not enter it as it was too late anyway, but just took a look at the boats.

It was getting late by now. Ok, actually it was only around 4:30pm, but after the time shift to winter time in South Australia it got dark at .. 6:30pm. We had decided that from now on we wanted to be on time to find a suitable campsite and to erect the tent in the last sunlight. So we followed an advice from the local Information Center that there’s a free campsite (with toilets – woohoo!) at Fishery Bay. Sounded perfect .. off we went.

On the way to Fishery Bay we got a first glimpse of what would await us in the Lincoln National Park – e.g. the gigantic sand dunes in Sleaford Bay.

There is a 4WD track leading from Sleaford to Wanna called the Sleaford – Wanna Dune Track .. and oh, you guessed right. We were so wanting to do that ..

Arriving in Fishery Bay, we were eager to set up our brand new tent for the first time. We had bought a 4-person dome tent with a lot of space – 210x240cm. But that was well filled by our brand new air mattress – coming in a size of 200x150cm. Gone were the times with a crappy futon mattress in a lousy little tent!

Our spot even had a fire area prepared for us. This looked like campers’ heaven, or not? It would get even better when we walked down the 100 meters to the beach whose waves had already made an impressive sound ..

We concluded the day with a fantastic campfire and prepared a couple of oh so tasty burgers – Inka had one, I could not resist to eat 3. A cold beer helped a lot to make us believe that our second night restarting our travels would be much better than the first one ..