Monday 7th April

This has been another wonderful day. We’re back wearing shorts and T shirts again and enjoying this lovely burst of the sort of weather we’d hoped to have most of the time we’ve been here.

After clearing from the motel, we drove only a half km to visit Umpherston Sinkhole.

In1860 James Umpherston bought the land containing the sinkhole from John Beswick and after giving up farming, proceeded to design a garden in and around it about 1884. The hole is very deep (we couldn’t find any figures for the actual depth) – you wouldn’t want to wake up one morning and find its like opened up in your grounds! The local authorities have kept the garden going and it has become a favourite spot for visitors and locals to enjoy. In the evenings, although the garden is closed, the area around it is floodlit and the possums come down from the surrounding trees to be fed by visitors. We’re told they’re very tame and harmless.

We drove round to the Blue Lake, which is formed in the crater left by a volcano many thousands of years ago. The lake is renowned for its startling blue colour from November through to April – it was still a deep shade of blue today. It’s an average depth of 70m, covers 70 hectares and is about 5km round the edge. We had hoped to walk around it but found that, although there is a walk, you actually can’t get anywhere near it as the water is deep within the crater, so we consoled ourselves with taking photos from one of the viewpoints and drove round the rest! The local town uses it for drinking water, and extracts 4000 million litres a year, with the outflow being replaced by seepage from the local aquifer. It's dropped two metres in the last 25 years.

While driving back into town, Tom spied this notice – But we couldn’t see any falling trees, they all appeared to have been “falled” already!

In the centre of the town, we made for the Caves Garden, hoping for something spectacular, but were disappointed. This “cave” is another sinkhole, even deeper than Umpherston’s, but is in a bit of a sorry state with a trolley and wheelie bin thrown into the bottom (some of the few bits of real rubbish we’ve seen around). The gardens round it are very pretty. The town has loads of really lovely old buildings kept very well and, like nearly all the places we’ve visited, the streets are free from litter and kept swept.

Tom was very kind to me again and pointed out yet another patchwork shop – the Pine Country Patchwork, owned and run by a delightful lady, Glenny Tiller! I think he’s trying to make up for the you-know-whats! I found some more Australian fabrics and we enjoyed some cheerful chat and local knowledge with the ladies there, while marvelling at the quilts hanging on the walls. This was another place I could cheerfully have stayed for hours. We went on for coffee and cakes at McCafe, the new arm of McDonalds in Oz (do we have them in UK?) before setting off towards the west coast.

We left the Princes Hwy at Millicent and joined the Southern Ports Hwy to Beachport. Just before Beachport, we stopped to laugh at a roadside memorial to the commencement of drainage construction in this area BUT we then read the legend properly and realised our laughter was misguided. The whole of the area, which is very flat, was once flooded to a depth of over one metre for much of each year rendering the land unusable. Since the massive drainage system was put in place, the land is now fertile, freeing thousands of acres for farming of crops and livestock. So we considered ourselves chastised!

A little further on, we came upon a huge slab of rock set into a fenced enclosure by the beach. This is a son’s memorial to his father who drowned in the bay in 1937, and to all fishermen from Beachport who’ve lost their lives at sea. There’s also a viewing platform looking up and down this beautiful stretch of beach and this was erected to commemorate the first 2 servicemen to lose their lives in WWII as a result of enemy action – they were blown up by a mine they were defusing. Arriving at Beachport, we found it to be an exceptionally clean and tidy small town, joint winner of the medium sized towns competition. The Tourist info is also a branch of the Library, an internet access point and a medical centre. The town boasts the second longest jetty in SA, built between 1878 and 1882, originally 1220m, but now only 770m. We then drove the tourist route round the town and saw some very good surf beaches although no-one was out today.

On the last lap of today’s journey, we stopped to take photos of Woakwine Cutting. This is a cutting through a 1km long, 28-34m deep length of rock which was stopping the drainage of a large tract of waterlogged land. Two men took 3 years to blast and rip the rock out, removing 276,000cubic metres of material. It’s an amazing sight.

Eventually, we reached Robe where we’re at the Lake View Motel - and, yes, we do have a view of the lake from our room! We were pointed to a restaurant for dinner and left here just before 7.00pm arriving at the restaurant just after 7. We got back here at 9.30! The food was excellent but the service was the pits! When we got back, we found our room crawling with little black millipedes – Yeuk!! We called out the proprietor who came and removed them and placed towels at the front and back doors to try to stop them coming in – I don’t know whether I’ll sleep tonight!! He says they’re harmless….Tom’s sprayed all round the room to help but I’ll let you know tomorrow how the night progressed!! Night, night for now.