Balaklava to Port Wakefield -- the top of the gulf

Heading to Balaklava and points north and east, you're in grain country now. These silos loom over Balaklava.

Snowtown ... Alaskan Dave was enchanted by the name! In fact, the town's greatest claim to fame is a
rather gruesome murder! We'll visit Snowtown in a later post, but for now --

As the sign says, 'Welcome to Balaklava!' And the barley icon tells all...

Balaklava is a town that seems to have been there forever. It's steeped in colonial history...

So many original buildings survive, not as ruins and museums, but as homes --
and they're being refurbished. Like this old, old house, tricked out with solar panels.

Main street, Balaklava. If it happens, this is where it happens.

Modern tech stands cheek-by jowl with history...

...and the grain silos loom over the whole town. They're marked up with the Viterra logo. 

No prizes will be awarded for guessing the local industry in Balaklava, South Australia!

Lovely colonial architecture -- the Uniting Church, well refurbished, and a couple of hundred meters away --

Some of the biggest silos you can imagine. They're huge, dwarfing nearby houses and shops.

Just outside Balaklava, we noticed an unusual memorial -- for young cyclist Shamus Liptrot...

...and read an inspiring story of courage and determination.

Learn a little more about the town and region, before hitting the road...

Well, now -- bush races! Now, there's a thought...

Back on the road, leaving Balaklava now...

..and where the industry isn't barley or wheat, it's hay -- stock feed.

Auburn would take us back to Clare ... we're headed for Port Wakefield now...

...through some of the busiest agricultural country in the state's mid-north.

Port Wakefield -- actually, the Wakefield River which runs behind the town.

The landscape is flat, and around the river, so marshy, you suspect routine winter floods...

Look away from the river (NW, in this case), and the scene is arid, so typically Australian
you could be looking at a location from Boney.

Those hills in the background are where we're going next ... around the top of the Gulf St. Vincent...

Does this road go anywhere? If we'd been in a 4x4, we might have explored. It probably goes to a good
fishing spot, but Lola's a Mitsubishi Magna with too much sense to head off over this.

The road here is rougher than it looks. Aussie road signs read in K's, not miles, remember.
This one is setting a limit of something like 6mph. 

If you view this at full size, in the middle distance, beyond the marshy bushes, you can see the sea...
that's it -- the very, very top of the Gulf St. Vincent, with Yorke Peninsula beyond. Cool.

Getting out of Dodge again. Port Wakefield is something of a truckstop, though there's a fairly
large town there now. And a very neat caravan park on the river!

Learn a little more about Port Wakefield before we head on out --

A piece of history in the parking lot at the absolute top of the gulf, where the roads go in all four directions...

A great little story from the National Trust. But someone needs to proofread these signs!!

Lola looking sharp in the aforementioned parking lot, with the metal-sculpture emu, and in the background...
Dang, we stayed too long. See the house on the low-loader, on the south-bound road?

So we decide to take another way through to Yorke Peninsula, and we put ourselves
on the Copper Coast Highway. Headed west and south to points unknown...

The Copper Coast Highway. Tolkien said it: the road goes ever on. And on. And on...

Friday, it was time to head west to the other end of the copper mining industry that was one of the forces that opened up the state of South Australia. The day before, we'd seen the actual mines and smelter chimneys at Burra, where the ore was cut out of the ground ... we'd spend about 47 seconds in Mintaro (like the man said in the movie, we'd be back), which was built originally as a halfway-house, or roadhouse, for the "bullockies," the guys driving the massive bullock wagons taking the ore over to the ports on the gulf. Okay -- now it was time to go check out those ports.

The drive takes you into grain country ... barley and wheat. You start to see the silos by the time you get to Balaklava -- which was also time to get some breakfast. We'd left our base at the Clare Valley Motel early, with the idea of going as far as possible before we ran out of daylight. This late in autumn, or fall, and after daylight saving has finished, you lose the daylight by about 6:30, and it's too dark to take good photos after about 5:00. So we got on the road early, with the idea of finding brekkie in Balakava...

And we found a place that looks like a convenience store from the outside, or even a tobacconist, but in fact it's something very like a truckstop, with great food, double-size coffees, and everything a truckie could need before blasting through for any point on the compass. For Dave, a big bacon and egg sandwich with onion rings on the side; for Jade, a great ham and cheese croissant, toasted; and some of the best coffee we'd found on this trip! For some reason, we didn't get a photo of the place. (Why not? 'Tis a mystery! Neither of us thought of it. Doah.) So this image was captured from Google Earth, to fill the gap.

Leaving Balaklava, we pointed ourselves at Port Wakefield, which is at the head of the Gulf St. Vincent. In one of the images, above, you can see the marshy salt bushes on this side, then the narrow strip of sea, and the hills on the York Peninsula, on the other side. Port Wakefield is more of a giant truckstop than a town (all gas stations and dealerships), but it has a cool caravan park on the Wakefield River. We only stopped for twenty minutes or so ... long enough to get some photos ... and then the plan was, we'd head directly down the coast road on the other side of the gulf, and be in Ardrossan in something like 30-40 minutes. Right? Right. Uh huh.

So we stopped, first, at the huge, truck-sized parking lot at the top of the gulf, to photograph the immense, flat landscape and read the history of the region on the information boards, and see the metal sculpture kangaroo and emu (which, incidentally, for our American rellies and mates, is pronouced "eem-you," not, repeat not "ee-moo"), and the stump-jump plow. And we stuck around about half a minute too long...

If you view the picture of the car (read: Lola) at full size, you can see, on the road in the background, a transportable house being shipped on the back of a low-loader, with police escort. In the next ten seconds, two cars and a huge truck tagged onto the end of the convoy. We figured we'd be going to Ardrossan at 40kph, so --

Change of plans. We decided to take the long way around. Head out on the Copper Coast Highway, hang a left and blast down the very middle of Yorke Peninsula, check out the beautiful grain port of Ardrossan, and then head back up to the old ore shipping ports of Wallaroo and Moonta and so on.

Tomorrow: Yorke Peninsula, red cliffs, green seas and a humongous jetty ... Adrossan and Moonta.

World's End and Burra Creek Gorge ... watching out for Mad Max!

South Australia's mid-north agricultural region can be very picturesque.

The road out of Burra, headed for the World's End Highway. It's long, it's hot, but --

...driving these roads, you're rarely absolutely alone. It's surprising how much traffic you see.

The country's flat; the local crop seems to be hay (stock feed), and if you see field animals, they're sheep.

Big trucks abound; they're almost always carrying fertilizer and stock feed. This one's loaded.

Leaving "civilization" behind. You know the shot right at the beginning of Mad Max? Looks a lot like this!

Yet even out here, people live and work -- rainwater tanks stand in an apparent wilderness...

...and here's a crop not yet reaped. You can see that in this area, water is a precious commodity.

It's no surprise to see the water pipeline following the road from town to town.

A few weeks short of winter, and to say it's dusty is a terrible understatement!

If you're wondering how most of these pictures happen -- here's how!
Literally, a self-portrait of the photographer at work.

Signs of human activity: crops, fences, vehicle tracks in what would otherwise look like a desert --

-- a vehicle moves off-road, on a farm track, raising a duststorm. It's actually a tractor. They're plowing this!

Well on the way to World's End Highway. Just follow the signs. Surprise: good mobile phone coverage.

The mid-north is actually very busy, a hive of activity and industry --

-- windlasses provide power to a remote, arid region, supplementing the wind farms.

Heat haze shimmers over the road, turning everything into a mirage, and --

Now, you really are alone. Looks like a scene out of the old TV series, Boney --

World's End. Looks like a scene out of Mad Max 2 - The Road Warrior!

Follow the signs ... parched hills rise up out of the flat, table-like landscape...

Burra Creek Gorge -- and even here, a crop's just been brought in and sheep are grazing the stubble.

Long, long zoom into the distance: a homestead at World's End. Note the tractor, bottom right.

People have been settling and farming in this area for over 150 years. The landscape is punctuated by
many ruins of the houses built by the early settlers.

Lola, the Mitsubishi Magna, takes a welcome breather at Burra Creek Gorge ... looking sharp!

The region has been completely overtaken by agriculture ... mostly "monoculture" -- hay! -- so the concept
of a biodiversity corridor for surviving wildlife is not just attractive, but increasingly critical.

Driving in the mid-north, the sky can often by hazy, the air thick and heavy with smoke.
You think, ye gods, is a bushfire coming this way? Like --

-- an explosion just over the next line of hills? But no. These fires are everywhere in the mid-north...
farmers are just "burning off" after bringing in a crop and letting sheep graze the stubble. The result...

Miles and miles of burned paddocks, some still smoldering. It smells of "burning," makes you sneeze.

Time to skedaddle! Headed "home," back to Clare, with dinner on our minds.

The road from Burra to World's End -- or at least the World's End Highway -- leads southeast, and you soon seem to leave civilization behind. The landscape starts to look a lot like the locations from Mad Max (the first one, set just before the world went mad, you know the one. Max might have been thoroughly bonkers by the end of the movie, but Mel Gibson was just 21, and still sane...).

You follow the signs, past outposts of human industry, ruins of farmsteads long forgotten, windlasses turning in the hot, restless air, sheep grazing the stubble, black paddocks that have been burned off. The air is so hot, the road shimmers like a mirage and the landscape gradually becomes even dryer, and redder, till you're seeing something very like the locations for Mad Max 2, which was retitled for American audiences and is better known overseas as The Road Warrior.

Families live and work out here -- kids grow up in these remote areas, in a heck of a lot more isolation than the kids at the center of the action of Colin Thiele's classic Sun on the Stubble. (That book was set in a very slightly fictionalized Eudunda, which might be on this very same road  -- check out the roadsign, above -- but in fact is far away from World's End, and still in a region where small towns abound. This road goes ever on, and on, and on, and...!)

We stopped, right where it tee'd, with one branch heading off to Morgan and Renmark. We do intend to visit Renmark fairly soon -- it's in the riverland, and best visited in the dead of winter when the temperature won't be prohibitive. But we weren't going the today. We we headed for World's End and the Burra Creek Gorge.

The hills rise up out of a vast, flat landscape, and going by the trees, there's good ground water at the gorge. You see stands of very old, very massive trees -- they're not waiting for rain.; they have their roots in the water table. The gorge area is astonishingly beautiful, in a stark and harsh kind of way. And tucked away in a crevasse is -- to our astonishment -- a caravan parking ground (trailer park, if you will). Not a formal caravan park, as such, just a safe area where you can legally park, uh, caravans. Several big motorhomes were parked there, and a 4x4 took off down a dirt road into the heart of the gorge. We didn't want to take the car down that road -- way too many ruts and rocks.

So at this point we turned back for Clare -- "home base" -- with dinner in mind. Well, dinner and air conditioning, and a dip in the pool!