McLaren Vale & Fleurieu Peninsula
Hello everyone,
This Sunday has been great. We rented a car for Sunday and Monday (which happens to be Labor Day this year 🙂 ) We got up very early to hit the road fast which we did at around 9 am.
First thing we did was Port Noarlunga where we wanted to see the coast with its cliffs. They are not very big, but very colorful. Sadly enough we had a cloudy morning.
The next stop was McLaren Vale which is a pretty famous wine region down here. Winegrowing is somewhat different here than at the Mosel. It's not done on the side of hills, but within the flat land. The way they do it is to tie the wine up making it look like little trees with two branches. Seems to work very well. We didn't do a whine tasting though. Got to stay sober for the road 🙁 We actually found the wineyard Verena went to last year though. Very nice place ...
From there we went down to Port Elliot. For some reason it's so much less kown than Victor Harbor, but it's more beautiful. It has a little, historic train station and a well-known bakery. We bought a bun, a pie and donuts, of course.
The very specialty came up at Port Elliot though. Well, rather at Basham Beach. We got to see 7 or 8 Southern Right Whales. Isn't that cool? We actually thought we wouldn't see any, because it's somewhat late in the season, but there they were. And not only were they there, about 4 of them were about 50m away from us, just off the shore! The others were pretty close too, but that may well have been some hundred meters. So just in case someone wants to watch whales own here, do not go to Victor Harbor ... go to Port Elliot and Basham Beach 😉
After about 3 hrs of whale watching it became more cloudy and we went through Victor Harbor right to Waitpinga Beach that's part of the Newland Head Conservation Park. As it wasn't exactly sunny and all that anymore we stayed only for a few moments and went back to Victor Harbor.
After having some pizza we went to Granite Island in the dark. You have to cross a long bridge (400 m or so) where a horse tram goes which kind of makes it interesting 🙂 On the small island there are living Little Penguins that really deserve the name as the reach about 35 cm in height. We managed to find one that was sitting in its tiny "cave". Pretty cute ...
Later we headed home directly as it was dark and still more than an hour to drive from Victor Harbor. We were tired, but happy. This has definitely been a great day!
Cheers, Johannes & Verena
And here a few pictures of the day...
3 Southern Right Whales
Tail fin of a Southern Right Whale
Verena and the Southern Right Whales
Moonlight from Granite Island