All Posts in Order: Lions and Lakes 2015, it's a wrap.

 

Aldgate Providore

Part One: Aldgate for a Spanish brunch, Mount Lofty lights up with fall colors, and the sun sets over Clayton Bay

Sailboat at Clayton Bay

Part Two: Dawn at Milang, Breakfast at Clayton Bay, English 'dry stone walls' at Callington, then -- lions and zebras and bison, oh my!

Lioness at Monarto

Part Three: Destination: Monarto! Lions, giraffes, meerkats ... on safari in South Aus

Mobilong Lookout, Murray Bridge

Part Four: Monarto to Murray Bridge, and on to Milang

Waterbirds on Lake Alexandrina

Part Five: "Birding" at Milang, breakfast at Wellington, on a glorious morning

Rusticana Wines, Langhorne Region

 









 Part Six: Rusticana Wines and on to Goolwa -- seals, black swans and pelicans on the barrages

Aldgate for a Spanish brunch, Mount Lofty lights up with fall colors, and the sun sets over Clayton Bay

First order of priority: breakfast! Aldgate Providore and Cafe in, uh, Aldgate.

The Aldgate Providore is a Spanish-themed cafe-restaurant with great food. Dave orders up a fine breakfast --

-- and spectacular coffee! Suitably refueled, we're off to --

-- catch the fall colors at Mount Lofty Botanic Garden on a cool, calm morning in late March.

March is the beginning of fall ... in Australia, of course. Oak trees know about this ... ripe acorns prove it.

Eurtopean and North American trees are glorious in this season.

The Mount Lofty Botanic Garden is 100% irrigated from storm water catchment. The lake at the heart of the park
is actually the catchment area, from which the water is pumped in all directions.

The park is situated high in the hills -- cooler even on very hot days. March can be astonishing hot,
but on this autumn day it was cool and nice.

The "bog garden" is a duck pond at the very lowest point of the park...

...and home to many plants that look utterly alien.

The view over the water catchment lake from the far side...

...where glory vines are changing color in honor of the season.

Only "imported" trees change color in the fall. There isn't a single Australian native that does it.

Follow the paths through and around some really beautiful old trees on yor way back to the parking lot (or
car park, if you want it in the native Aussie), and then you're on your way...

After checking into the Milang Lakes Motel by Lake Alexandrina, we went directly over to
Clayton Bay ... always wanted to photograph the sunset from there. Let's show you why...

Clayton Bay is an area as well as a town. Here's what Wikipedia says about it: "Clayton Bay is a small town on the River Murray in South Australia. The town is located opposite the north-east tip of Hindmarsh Island, 87 kilometres by road from Adelaide or 12 kilometres upriver from Goolwa." So there, now you know.

That's the marina in the middle of the shot. The town stretches off to your right.

Silver gulls are the most common seagulls you'll see in South Australia -- but far from the only ones.

You'll see silver gulls on every beach in the state, and along most of the rivers in any proximity to the sea.

Clayton Bay is home to a very active boatie community -- it has a busy marina (see the above picture).

The sun is almost down now. We sat on a bench on a bluff right above the water, waiting for the moment...

Digital cameras hate these lighting conditions. Shots captured on the automatic settings are
invariably poor. So -- switch to full manual right about now.

A flight of ducks heading back up to Lake Alexandrina for the evening, and...

Photography meets art! A rare, utterly perfect shot.

And here's why we've always wanted to photograph the sunset from Clayton Bay. Wow.

Taken at almost the same moment as the shot above -- this image doesn't use any of the camera's
filters or arty techniques. All "normal light" shots were done on full manual ...

...and the sun was gone in another minute. Next? Dinner, please!

Dave gets creative with a signboard beside the jetty. Wow -- what an effect!

We'd gone out for three days on this trip, so we had time to dawdle, no reason to hurry over anything. Only one thing was time sensitive: Monarto Wildlife Park, which closes its gates at about 4:00pm, so you need to get there early-ish. This was reserved for the second day of the excursion, so on the first day we could afford to meander... and we did!

On many of these trips we'll start out with breakfast in Aldgate. There's a couple of places we know there that are terrific for brunch. A favorite is the Aldgate Providore and Cafe, which is a Spanish-themed cafe-restaurant with very different, and very good, food ... and extremely good coffee.

From there, we circuited Mount Lofty a little way ... and in true meandering fashion, stopped again. The Mount Lofty Botanic Gardens is one of our favorite places, especially in fall. The park changes so much from season to season ... see it in this post, in all its summer green, in 2013. Caching the fall colors just right is not easy. Too early, and you see nothing; too late, and the trees will be stripped by a high wind.

March can be very hot in South Australia. In other years it's been over 100 degrees Fahrenheit on this date, but this year we were lucky. The weather was cool, a little overcast, with skies clearing as the day progressed. Nice.

From the botanic park, we headed directly to Milang to check in at the Milang Lakes motel. Didn't take photos on this occasion, because we've photographed Milang so often already. If you'd like to fill in the blank, see this post: Milang and Lake Alexandrina -- wetlands, sailboats, big skies and a lot of history. That shows all, tells all.

And as soon as we'd unloaded the car we went directly to Clayton Bay to do something we'd always wanted to do: photograph the sunset from there. These pictures show why!

Then it was back to the motel for supper and a quiet night's sleep. In the morning, we planned to photograph dawn over the wetlands, as we always do, before heading over to Monarto for a date with lions, giraffes, antelope, rhino, zebras, meerkats! Couldn't wait for this ... and we'll start the Monarto pictures in the next post. There's quite a lot, so it'll take two posts to cover even some of them.

Breakfast in Aldgate ... Colonial history in Birdwood ... welcome swallows on the Whispering Wall

Aldgate ... first stop, breakfast! Fall colors tell you this is April in South Australia.

On the Onkaparinga Scenic Drive ... Dave takes a second to upload a pic to facebook.
Next stop: Birdwood... 

Colonial architecture and autumn colors in Birdwood, South Australia...

...a town which was originally known as Blumberg.

Jacarandas changing to gold. Winter's around the corner.

The mill on Birdwood's main drag.

A little history of the tanbark mill...

Bright, sizzling sunshine. It's hot! Anyone for ice cream?

Heading out of Birdwood; next stop: Barossa Valley, and here's a vineyard already.
Actually, vines are grown in many, many regions in this state.

Next stop: the Whispering Wall on the Barossa Dam.

It's hot. That is -- H-O-T. Where did we put the hats?

The Barossa Dam ... a serious piece of engineering...

...good, high water levels on the Barossa Reservoir...

...and Welcome Swallows by the scores!

The Welcome Swallow is a tiny bird, about the size of your thumb;
they're common in almost all parts of Australia

Dave hiked the whole way across, so we could test out the whispering thing --
and they're right. Whisper on one side, and you hear perfectly on the other. 

Lola, being a sensible Mitsubishi Magna, says it's way too hot here.
Time to get out of Dodge.

A gentle reminder to the legions of international tourists visiting here:
drive on the left side in Australia. Yes, we're weird.

Next stop, the Barossa Valley. In fact -- that's the gateway to Lyndoch Hill on the left!

Wednesday: the Adelaide weather forecast was for 30 degrees, shade temperature, blue skies, light breezes. The plan: leave via Handorf and grab breakfast in Birdwood. Best laid plans usually get changed, and ours did. Roadworks rerouted us a couple of times, and by 9:15 we were hungry enough to say, "nuts, let's stop in Aldgate for brekkie, and then we can dawdle to Birdwood."

Fall colors in the area are gorgeous. We parked off one side of the main street, where the town has done fantastic things with the long, linear parking lot (carpark, if you prefer)  serving the train station. It's become a lovely garden -- and right opposite is the Aldgate Providore and Cafe. [Update: in 2016 the name changed to "The Fred Eatery" and the menu has changed. Still good, but different.]

The food was great, and the decor and theme is "Mexican cantina." So neat -- and the menu looks terrific. We do like Mexican, and we're promising ourselves at least one lunch there, very soon. Breakfast as we headed out on Wednesday? Jade had the free range eggs, Nairne bacon (98% lean) and baked tomato. Talk about healthy. Dave had the breakfast bruschetta with poached eggs, avocado, tomato, and fresh coriander (cilantro, if you prefer). Healthy, again. Great coffee, too. The staff are renovating at this time, and will be open for dinner again soon, but right now they're serving brekkie and lunch.

Suitably refueled, it was time to head for Birdwood, a town that was once known as Blumberg. See the plaque, above, for a potted history. World War I changed many things -- the face of the Australian map, for instance. Birdwood's gratest claim to fame is arguably the National Motor Musuem, which, weirdly, doesn't have its own website, but you can find a bit about it here. This time around, we didn't go into the museum -- just photographed the outside (see the photo we uploaded yesterday) -- because we did the whole thing in enormous detail only a couple of years ago. We'll show you the inside in some dedicated posts, as we go along.

We took in a bit of Colonial history, but the UV must have been sky-high. It was hot in the sun; you hugged any shade you could find and reminded yourself, it'll be winter in seven weeks. Climate change?

Heading out of "Old Blumberg," headed for the Barossa Valley, it's not long before you start to see vineyards. If fact, enormous areas of South Australia are suitable for, and devoted to, vineyarding. There are several clearly distinct wine regions: Clare Valley, Barossa Valley, McClaren Vale, Langhorn and Coonawarra are the main ones; there's also a few new ones, or minor ones, where people are trying new varieties and experiments, as the climate changes. McClaren Vale is our local wine area. From where we live right now, you can be in the Vale in about ten minutes flat. And of course, we have a bias ... to us, the McClaren Vale wines are the best. (In fact ... they actually are! We've tasted Barossa, Clare Valley and Langhorn, and the local wines are just better.)

Next stop: the Whispering Wall, on the Barossa Dam. Why? Because we've never done this before. We came close a few years ago, working our way back from the Barossa, not long before Christmas, 2008. The problem that day was, the gates were locked, the place was closed to public access on account of the Total Fire Ban ... unsurprising, because the heat was ferocious. Seems management doesn't want to take responsibility for tourists and travelers in that heat, and with the very real risk of big, big fires. (SA has been lucky lately; we haven't had a really big one in years. Which means we're overdue for one. Dang.)

The Whispering Wall is fantastic: two people stand on opposite sides of the wall and whisper, and the sound carries so perfectly, you can even hear the other person breathing! It's better than a cell phone. Amazing. Dave took the hike across the whole dam head ... Jade stopped in the middle to photograph the swallows, which flock around the dam by the scores. They're Welcome Swallows, tiny, beautiful birds about the size of your thumb ... iridescent in the sunlight. They're common in most parts of Australia ... and from what we've seen, they must eat their weight in insects every day. Thank heavens we have them!

It was a bit after noon by this time, and Lola (being a perfectly sensible Mitsubishi Magna) was clearly heard to say that it was way too hot in this neck of the woods, and it was time to get out of this part of Dodge. We listened attentively, and were aboard when she headed out ... past a sign reminding international travelers to (!) "Drive on the left in Australia." No, really? Hmm. Wonder if that has anything to do with the fact the steering wheel is on the wrong side of the car down here? LOL ... yes, we're weird. We don't deny it.

So we were headed for the Barossa Valley in the early afternoon ... driving north into hot, dry, dusty country where the vineyards are a welcome splash of green. Actually, late in autumn (fall, if you like), they're changing to copper and gold, and very pretty).

Come back tomorrow to see a bit of the Barossa: Ice cream in Kapunda, onward and northward to the fantastic motel we called Base for three nights, and a lot more.