Urs' Gap Year Blog: Speed Gapping through South Australia

The term speed gapping originates in the United States, to be more precise just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, where my friend David Gould lives. He uses the term for people who don't linger long enough in a particular area during their gap year. To be fair, I am travelling through South Australia rather quickly, only spending six nights in total. This is not a reflection of a lack of tourist attractions or bad hospitality, it is more that after 73 days on the road I am getting a bit travel sore and look forward to unpacking my bags for more than a few nights. My current plan is to get to Thredbo sometime in the next couple of weeks. This is why I stay only one night at the time in all these beautiful places here. However, I have cut down the distance travelled for each day, so that I get some time to look around the main attractions.

Yesterday I drove from Streaky Bay to Clare. This meant crossing the Eyre Peninsula to Port Augusta and then heading south on the eastern side of the Spencer Gulf towards Adelaide. Driving to Port Augusta took most time of the drive, the Eyre Peninsula is quite fat, with a lot of grain fields on the western side, but quite arid on the eastern side towards Port Augusta, reminiscent of the outback, maybe that is why the mountains in that area are called the Middleback Ranges. I didn't take any detours or scenic drives, but I did stop at a town called Kimba to be able to bring you a picture of the big galah, which is surely of equal cultural value to the big trout in Adaminaby.

The big galah in Kimba

Landscape on the eastern half of the Eyre Peninsula

Driving south from Port Augusta takes you through grain growing areas again, but to start with the left hand side of the view is dominated by the southern end of the Flinders Ranges, which are an imposing sight when you first drive into Port Augusta. When you get to the Clare Valley the sweeping wheat fields turn into a more hilly landscape, with a mix of smaller wheat fields and vineyards. I didn't visit any wineries, but did a loop walk early in the morning that took me past several of them. The Riesling Trail is a cycling/walking track that runs for 35 kilometres through the Clare Valley and has a few loop walks branching off it. The walk that I did is only a 9 km loop called the John Horrocks Loop Walk. John Horrocks was one of the first settlers in the area and founded the town of Penwortham, through which the walk leads. He didn't grow old because he shot himself by accident when his camel bucked on an expedition to find more agricultural land in the north of the colony. As you can tell from my knowledge of local history, there are interpretative signs along the walk...

I started and ended the loop by the Sevenhill Pub, 6 km south of Clare

Despite the tempting big signs I followed the little yellow marker on the bottom left

The walk goes past many vineyards and cellar doors

And finishes along the Riesling Trail

After my walk I headed off on the next part of my speed gapping to a town called Victor Harbor, south of Adelaide. It is only a 220 km drive, but it leads straight through the city, which is a bit time consuming. If you have a need for more vineyards, the McLaren Vale wine region is along the way. It is much more open than the Clare Valley with more sweeping vineyards, similar to the ones at Margaret River, also because of the proximity to the coast.

View over McLaren Vale

Victor Harbor is the premier tourist town for Adelaide. I heard it mentioned on the radio a few time on my drive through the Nullarbor, because last week was "Schoolies Week", which is an Australian tradition that demands the high school leavers to congregate in tourist resorts and celebrate as hard as they can. Victor Harbor is for the Adelaide schoolies what the Gold Coast is for the Brisbane ones. Apparently there were 26 arrests on the weekend that just passed. Luckily the week is over and the town is quite again (apparently non school leavers that stay here during schoolies are called foolies). I walked through the old town centre and then across the jetty over the causeway to Granite Island, where the actual harbour used to be. The town was established in 1863 as a port through the extension of a horse drawn tramway from the town of Goolwa, which is at the mouth of the mighty River Murray, where the wool and other agricultural goods arrived from the inland farmers. Early in the nineteenth century there was also a thriving whaling station near Victor Harbor, but they slaughtered the southern right whales with such vigour that they ran out of them by 1872. Nowadays the whale population has somewhat recovered and from July to September you can come whale watching. The bay on which Victor Harbor is situated is called Encounter Bay, named by Mattew Flinders on his 1802 circumnavigation on the Investigator, after having an encounter with the French Captain Nicholas Baudin on the ship Le Geographe, after which a lot of places in the south west of Western Australia are named. Driving around Australia really brings all these events together and shows the far reach of these explorers.