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

Dawn rises over the wetlands at Milang, South Australia...

...and when we're staying over in Milang the day begins with a photo assignment --

You get up when the first flush of dawn colors appears in the sky, and...

...walk right across the empty main road outside the Milang Lakes Motel...

...and there's the wetlands, and the rising sun.

On this trip the sky was clear, which doesn't make for a brilliant dawn, so --

-- the challenge was to "get creative" with the shots, and... 

...make the most of everything we had to work with. In the end we wound up with so many good shots --

-- the hardest thing was paring them down to a scant handful to upload here!

The weltlands were alive with birds that morning -- 

-- and not one of them came close enough to photograph! So we said  "nuts" and --

-- went right back over to Clayton Bay, pronto, on another assignment: breakfast!

Sails at Clayton Bay is a marvelous cafe-restaurant, and

-- they're situated right there on the waterfront...

--serving the best breakfast you can imagine. This hit the spot. Yum!

Clayton Bay: "you are here." You can actually read the history on the board here, seen at full size.

Looks like a great day to be out on the water. Boats were launching e very few minutes --

-- from the boatramp right alongside the jetty, while...

...pelicans fished for their own breakfast along the riverbank.

But we have a date with lions and zebras, so it's already time to get out of Dodge!

Halfway over to Monarto, we stopped on Callington Road to capture a photogenic landscape. 

The Callington area is a picturebook landscape. It must be lovely in winter, when it's green. Must come back!

Callington would very likely have been settled originally by folks from the UK, because --
check out their "dry stone walls." These are commonplace ... in England's north-east, that is.

Art meets nature. Eucalypt trees shed their bank, not their leaves --
and when they do, sometimes you get an effect like abstract painting. Pretty!

At last -- welcome to Monaro Wildlife Park ... not a 'zoo' as we generally think of them.

Drive right up to the gates and inside. Buy tickets at the kiosk to the right there.
It's actually quite expensive; but then again, it must cost a fortune to run this place. So...

Walking up from the huge "parking pasture" you enter the wildlife park itself right here.

The way in is through the shop. Yep, we'll be stopping there on the way out.
Check out the giraffe skeleton. Wow. There's also a lot more skeletons: next post!

Monarto is home not only to African wildlife, but to endangered species from other continents.
These are Przewalski's horses, and here's what Wikipedia says of them: "Dzungarian horse is a rare and
endangered subspecies of wild horse native to the steppes of central Asia."
And the good news is, they thrive -- and breed! -- at Monarto in South Australia.

Likewise, America bison thrive here -- though they must wonder what happened to the grass.
Seriously, Monarto is a series of massive paddocks in which grazing animals run almost totally free,
and the fact is, they graze simply out the land. Now...

... if Monarto were four times the size, staff could afford to move the stock from one paddock to another,
rotating herds around so the recently-grazed paddock could lie fallow and recover. Alas,
 there's no such luxury, so these animals may run free, but they're fed fro the back of a truck.

The zebras thrive at Monarto, and breed readily in this environment.

And Monarto contributes to the world-wide breeding program which is right now
rescuing the white rhino, bringing it back from the thin edge of extinction.

Grant's gazelles run free ... and the dead giveaway that these are in Australia is
hopping along the fence at upper left! Yep -- kangaroos also abound in these paddocks.
Can't see him clearly? Check out this picture at large size!

Then, it's on to the lion enclosure...

Lions! This is what you wanted to see, right?
We have some great pictures, which we'll be uploading in the next post!

It's been ten years since we last visited Monarto, and we were surprised by the changes. It's much more developed than we recall, and one of the best changes is that they now have a very excellent shuttle bus "service" running round and around inside the park. The bus stops at various points adjacent to the viewing areas for giraffes or lions or whatever, and you can get on and off said bus as often as you like, so you could spend as long as you wanted in a certain place.

The park is 2,500 acres, which sounds like a lot, but if Monarto has one problem it's that it's about 25% as big as it really needed to be, if it were going to remain lush and green. True, it'll be greener in wintertime, but herds of antelope, bison and so on will graze out the paddocks. In the end, the stock will be "fed off the back of a truck." (Which, yes, is also true of local domestic animals -- cattle, sheep, horses, alpacas. Even camels, if you're sharp-eyed.)

It's very good to see species which are endangered in other lands doing well here. One can hope that in future the conditions may be right for returning the great-great-grand-offspring of these creatures to the wild.

The sun shone, we hopped off the bus here and there, and we came home with so many terrific photos, it was a major challenge to pare them down to a comparative handful for blogging. We're also going to cover Monarto in at least two posts, so --

Next time: lions, giraffes and a lot more!

Riverlands 2014, Part Five: Banrock Station winery and wetlands, and waterbirds at Murray River Lock 3

Murray River Lock 3, at Overland Corner ... part of the flood-and-flow control system.
Cormorants take a break from fishing on the railings in mid-water.

Not only does the lock provide control of the amount of water going on down the river (which meets the
sea on the Coorong, at Goolwa and Hindmarsh Island), but it also provides a great environment for waterfowl.

You're wondering, how do boats get through? Especially those houseboats you see everywhere --

Passage for boats -- quite big ones -- is all in the mechanism...

Part of the function of the lock is obviously to control water flow, and measure it;
the second function is (duh!) to let vessels in and out --

And here's where your boat goes through the lock gate. Neat. The same mechanism works on the Goolwa barrages.

Pelicans thrive in flocks on the waters around Lock 3, and ...

-- several Large Egrets were dip-fishing along the shoreline just as those pelicans cruised by.

And we're back on the road, headed for Barmera ... eventually. 

The Riverland is flat. Very flat. The skies are vast, huge, enormous, and when the weather is changing
they can be spectacular. Hundreds of sky-shots were captured; here's one of the loveliest.
Weather forecast, anyone ...?

Now, where are we going?! The truth is, we were rapidly running of time, and we should have
hung a left and started back. But we're so glad we turned right instead, because --

Banrock Station! You've heard of it, it's world-famous, and here is is --

Inside Banrock Station's gates: about five kilometers (say, three miles) of dirt road that could have been a tad better,
and -- yoou see it -- hectare after hectare of ... yep, vineyards. (Lola handled the road just fine.)

Oh boy, there's a knife-and-fork icon on that sign ...
We were hungry by now -- time was racing by, who knows
where it goes. Should have been halfway home now, but ...

Banrock Station offers a world-class cafe as well as their lovely wines. Afternoon tea!

Wine tasting, inside the wine center; and cellar door sales are right here, too. 

A beautiful sculpture of Pelican and chicks, just inside the entry/exit. (The Stop! sign by the door simply
means they don't want you folks taking alcoholic beverages back out into the parking lot. Sensible.)

Banrock Station's other magic is its wetlands, which is actually the whole reason any of this exists...

This whole wilderness landscape has been recovered over the last 20 years or so; and the powers
behind Banrock Station invest large wedges of the winery's earnings in similar projects
right around the world ... even in Alaska, where they funded a "salmon ladder" in Anchorage!

Next stop: Lake Bonney... late in the day, under gathering skies. Spectacular.

Again, Lake Bonney, and folks fishing. Aha! Pelicans on patrol. Anyplace you find fisherman, there's pelicans,
waiting for "trash fish" to be thrown back and the keepers to be gutted. Yum!

Welcome to Berri ... and how we wished it was only nine in the morning! 

Berri Estates -- tanks belonging to the vineyard loom right on the roadside. That's a lot of wine!

Going through Berri, it was too late to stop. We went right on, headed for Loxton, and there, we did stop
before turning for home at last via a road we never drove before. That'll be in the next post!

If you're in the Overland Corner region, watch out for a simple little sign on the side of the highway, pointing out a dirt road. It says, "Lock 3 Rd," and though it's dirt, they keep it well graded. Take an hour out and enjoy a real pleasure: Murray River Lock 3.

There are seven locks on the river in South Australia, including the "barrages" at Goolwa (which you'll be seeing in the pictures recording our 2015 trip, uploaded right after Jade finishes out 2014's pictures. Promise.). This is -- duh -- the third of the seven locks, close to Barmera, but it's actually known as the Overland Corner lock.

If you're a boatie, much less a regular houseboat captain (what a holiday that would be!), you'll know all about these locks, weirs and barrages; but for the casual visitor, here's a little about them. (That whole page is tremendously interesting, but this is a link to the most pertinent bit.)

We spent about an hour there, some of the time playing with the friendliest little dog who was bored, wanted to play fetch with someone (anyone!), and had his own stick. The waters were rich with pelicans, cormorants, large egrets, white faced herons and welcome swallows. It's a fantastic destination for birders. The only thing it needs is a cafe, or at least a "tea wagon." Alas, no such facility is provided, and to be fair, we were the only visitors in an hour, so we can see why there's no coffee shop!

So after that pleasant hour we hit the road again, still headed outward from home, but by now realizing we were never going to make Renmark before we had to turn around and point Lola toward Adelaide...

The road takes you to Banrock Station ... world famous not merely for its fine wines but also for its wetlands, and the globe-wide conservation work they do. Proceeds from Banrock Station wine sales fund ecological projects in every corner of the world -- including Alaska, where they funded a "fish ladder" at Ship Creek, Anchorage. That's a kind of step-way of pools up which migrating salmon can leap to get upriver....

A hint of the story is given on their wine label (perfectly readable here, if you view this picture at larger size), and for a lot more of the story, see their website, which is a treat in itself. The work they do is amazing, and we buy their wines preferentially, since you're actually donating to the work every time you do.

Banrock Station's cafe is situated on the side of the building facing into the recently-rescued wetlands, and the views are superb ... like the coffee and cake. They also have a full-bore restaurant menu, and this would be a terrific place to stop for a meal, if you were staying in the area. Alas, we were only passing through with far, far to go, so we indulged in the aforementioned coffee and cake, and then hit the bitumen again.

Next stop was Lake Bonney, which looked broodingly spectacular in falling light, complete with pelicans galore. We stopped on the shore for a stretch of the legs and a bathroom break, and by this time we were also on the lookout for a handy gas station.

The time had almost come to turn back for Adelaide, because it's a long, long drive. We knew Berri was juuust about as far as we could go ... would love to spend several days in this region. The head-for-home decision came at the huge gas station in the next town up the road -- Loxton; and the end of the 2014 road trip will appear in the next post.