Adelaide to Arno Bay -  Beautiful sunny day for the first day of Autumn.

We moved out of Adelaide this morning and travelled north to Port Pirie, Port Augusta and down to the Eyre Peninsular.  The country north of Adelaide is flat and barren. 


Flat and dry barren country
with a some sheep

A salt lake

There are quite a few salt lakes in this area.

Our caravan

Our first stop for morning tea was Snowtown, a small township which came to fame or should I say infamous renown after the Snowtown "Bodies in the Barrels" murders about which a movie has been made called Snowtown.  Briefly what happened was that several people were abducted off the streets and murdered.  Their bodies were put in barrels of acid with intention of disposing of the bodies but the murderers used the wrong acid.  They moved the barrels to a disused bank in Snowtown.  Below is a picture of the bank which incidently is only a few doors away from the police stations! They then used their victims' identification to illegally claim welfare payment.   They were finally caught when locals noticed a bad smell coming from the building. 

The disused bank in the Snowtown
murders is the square redbrick building in the middle

The Snowtown Pub

The Snowtown Windfarm is also important to the area.  Everywhere you go along this coast you see the large windmills and this is not surprising because it is a very, very windy coastline.

One of the windmill blades which was far bigger
than I realised

Next town on our journey was Port Pirie.  This had a special memory for us.  When we emigrated from South Africa to Perth, WA in1972, we travelled across the Nullabor Plains on the Trans-Australia train together with our car.  We debarked at Port Pirie and drove the remainder of the way to Queensland.

Next town was Port Augusta.  This is quite a big town and the main centre for the area.  There are also a lot of industrial businesses here.

The Ghan Railway runs up from Adelaide to Darwin

The Outback Cenre

Camels are numerous in The Outback



An old Stone House

Next stop was Whyalla. A pleasant little town. The HMAS Whyalla was the first modern warship built in South Australia in 1941.  It has been returned to Whyalla. The museum also houses one of the largest H0 guage model railways in Australia with landscapes that replicate the real scenery along the railways to and from Whyalla, Iron Knob, Port Augustaor, Snowtown and Adelaide. (For the attention of RAW).

HMAS Whyalla

Whyalla

Capt Matthew Flinders & Capt Louis Claude de Saules de Freycinet

Next we called into Cowell - a pretty little village on  the coast - as with all the towns & villages along this coastline, the main activity is fishing.  All of this coastline is famous for its' oysters.  Cowell is also recognised as the oldest and one of the largest deposits in the world of nephrite jade.

We booked into a caravan park at Arno Bay for the night.  We were lucky - we had the last site.
It was late and it was a long journey today.  The managers at the caravan park had a beautiful garden full of colourful, perfumed roses and these were offered free for visitors to pick.  Of course we picked some and they smelt lovely in the van.  They also offered free use of sand boards for use in the sand dunes and in winter they offer free fishing trips.

Early the next morning we went for a walk across the mangroves on a boardwalk out to the sea.  A great deal of work and time as been put into these extensive boardwalks surprising in such a very small village espcially as a lot of the work was done by local volunteers.