South Australia - Ports and Peninsulas
Eyre Peninsula & Port Lincoln through to the Yorke Peninsula and onto the Fleurieu Peninsula
We departed Ceduna via the western side of the Eyre Peninsula hugging the coast and rolling through quaint seaside towns with names such as Streaky Bay and Smoky Bay, home to sublime seafood - think a bucket of succulent unshucked oysters for 10 bucks from a fisher’s shed (just remember to buy yourself a shucker first!) - past rugged limestone cliffs and caves and through pristine isolated beaches - mostly unspoiled and all but completely devoid of people. This is particularly the case in Coffin Bay, a national park filled with picturesque coves, cliffs, and aquatic and land-based wildlife.
The wild, crystal clear, unpolluted waters of this stretch of Australia harbour oysters, mussels, abalone and tuna which are world renowned and freeze shipped to Asia and beyond daily - a major factor why Port Lincoln, one of the southern tip of the peninsula, is home to the most millionaires per capita in Australia. But, the residents of Port Lincoln are not ostentatious types and you’d never realise this fact from visiting the picturesque yet somewhat sleepy regional centre.
Just up the road on the eastern side of the peninsula is Tumby Bay, a pretty seaside town famed for its street murals. Beyond there towards the end of the peninsula is the industrial city of Whyalla and at the end of the Spencer Gulf, Port Augusta.
From the Eyre Peninsula, we headed southeast to the Yorke Peninsula - a smaller yet similarly picturesque peninsula of farmland, coastal beaches and natural harbours, and small communities. We stayed a couple of nights in Moonta, part of the Copper Triangle along with Kadina and Wallaroo, which is often also referred to the Cornish Triangle, due to the large scale migration of Cornish miners to the region in the second half of the 1800s. As such, the towns of the Copper Triangle in particular Moonta grace historic sandstone buildings, abandoned mines and some of the best pasties you’d find outside Cornwall.
The town of Marion Bay on the southern tip of the peninsula is a beautiful seaside community and the coastline on the eastern side of the peninsula is home to pleasant seaside towns - some with views across Gulf St Vincent to Adelaide less than 100 kilometres away as the crow flies.
Now, you may have noticed that I titled this post - Ports and peninsulas. Well, that’s because South Australia has an abundance of both, there’s the well-knowns peninsulas of Eyre, Yorke and Fleurieu; then there’s ports, and a lot of them. You can tell that in the early days of European settlement the main mode of transportation along the southern coastline was by sea as seemingly every second town is named Port something. There’s Ports Augusta, Pirie, Lincoln, Adelaide, Elliott, Wakefield, and Willunga to name just the more notable ones.
From the Yorke peninsula we headed further southeast, bypassed Adelaide (for now, don’t worry we definitely got back there) and onto the Fleurieu Peninsula an hour and a half south of the South Australian capital. The Fleurieu is renowned for his stunning coast with sheer cliffs, ravines and isolated beaches; its undulating landscape of hills, mountains, valleys, forests, farmland and windy roads; its pretty towns and its fine, fresh produce - notably wine. Just beyond the peninsula to the north, lying between it and Adelaide further north is the world-renowned McLaren Vale wine region. Not only home to brilliant wines - reds in particular, notably Shiraz, Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot - but also fine, fresh produce and picture-postcard vineyards, villages, vistas and country roads. We stayed at Normanville, halfway down the peninsula and home to a nice town centre along with its neighbour township, Yankalilla, and attractive beach. Whilst, on the peninsula we ventured further south to nearby Victor Harbor - Adelaide’s nearest surf beach - and surrounding beaches to Goolwa by the mouth of the Murray and start of the Coorong.
After the ports and peninsulas done, we embarked for our next adventure onto Kangaroo Island …
