A full rest day today. We fiddled about and took in a tour of the Flinders red cliff lookout, which was a low hillock on the side of the Spencer Gulf with a view of the ranges, and then the Australian Arid Lands Botanic Gardens.
They're about a kilometre of road from the Stuart Highway, a tiny bit north of Port Augusta. The funny thing is, there doesn't appear to be a hell of a lot of difference from the vegetation on the side of the road to that within the gardens themselves - probably because we are still in the desert!
We took a good long walk around the gardens checking out the plants and continued to be amazed how small and pretty the flowers on these super hardy plants can be, with the exception of one eucalyptus which has the biggest nut and flower of all the eucalypts. Mind you, it was becoming increasingly difficult to pick between the plants and the weeds, if indeed they were weed and not 'native grasses' or something. We stalked a few birds to get snaps but they easily eluded us, so we snapped a few lazy butterflies instead.
Later on we went for a drive around town using the heritage walk guide and were suitably impressed with the age and preserved state of a whole bunch of houses and building dating from 1870. The nicest part of town is the old wharf, where they used to load goods onto and off the train and ships. They have kept the wharf and the rail lines on it. Under the wharf you can still see the original stone wall and wharf. The rest of the rails that used to go to the goods yards and onto the mainline are now buried under a Big W store.
Further up the Gulf, between the wharf and the main road bridge, is another jetty, last of 8 that graced the shoreline before they built the big wharf. No dolphins today unfortunately. Next along the shot is the old road bridge, still open for pedestrians. Right next to it, submerged in the shallows is the skeleton of an old timber barge. I was taking some snaps when a wizened old lady, who looked like she had lived here all her life, proceeded to lament the fact that they (the locals) had no collective sense of history and the barge would eventually just rot away. She went on to tell me how it was used to ferry wheat and wool from the west bank to the docks and again said how it was all a shame. I said nothing, but the book i had in front of me claimed that it was brought in especially from the Murray River in 1947 to aid in the widening of the old bridge and that when they had finished they found that they had effectively locked it into the upper reaches of the Gulf because it wouldn't fit back down past the new bridge. The area leads onto the current goods yards where we see them setting up another double decker freight train to go north or west. I'd never seen them stack two containers, one on top of the other, on a flatbed before. Now that's one way to compete with the road trucks, All they had to do was actually get the train moving....
Anyhow, that's us for the outback, tomorrow we'll be in the civilised climes of Adelaide for a week before starting our trek back 'across east'.
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| Flinders Red Cliff Lookout. Port Augusta SA |
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| Eucalyptus nut and flower. Australian Arid Land Botanic Garden. Port Augusta SA |
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| Butterflys. Australian Arid Land Botanic Garden. Port Augusta SA |
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| Plant and flower. Australian Arid Land Botanic Garden. Port Augusta SA |
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| A Art Work. Australian Arid Land Botanic Garden. Port Augusta SA |
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| A flower, possibly on a eucalyptus. Australian Arid Land Botanic Garden. Port Augusta SA |
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| Gum nuts. Australian Arid Land Botanic Garden. Port Augusta SA |
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| Wharf. Port Augusta SA |
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| Wharf. Port Augusta SA |
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| Wharf. Port Augusta SA |
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| Abandoned ex Murray River barge. Port Augusta SA |
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| Double-decker freight train. Port Augusta SA |
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