29th November to 5th December 1999 (Week 48)

The Week began with a walk to the Wilpena Pound. Wilpena Pound is a kind of a saucer shaped plateau which is surrounded by a number of peaks. The plateau is about 10 km wide and about 16 km long. A number of walking tracks are available to explore Wilpena Pound.

From Wilpena we drove via the scenic Maralana drive to the highway and onwards toHawker, Quorn to our destination Port Augusta. Here we visited the Wadlata Outback center. This center gives an insight into the earlier periods of the settlement of the outback through the early pioneers.

From Port Augusta we set out to explore Eyre Peninsula. we travelled via Whyalla through Arno Bay, Tamby Bay to Port Lincoln. Near Port Lincoln we visited the Glendara rose Gardens. the garden features 400 different roses on 3 acres. in the afternoon we visited the port Lincoln Nationalpark. A heavy thunderstorm forced us the to leave the park due to deteriorating road conditions.

The next day we set out to explore nearby Coffin Bay Nationalpark. It proved to be an absolutely beautiful Nationalpark. Featuring ever different bay's beaches as well as the landscape. The most impressive features were the huge sand dunes consisting of very fine white sand. The very same sand makes up the beautiful beaches. Light brown sand forms beatiful patterns on the white sand just like the icing on the cake. A great variety of birds, emu's, western grey kangaroos and lots of rabbits can be seen all day around. The most beautiful sites are only accessible by 4WD. Mostly through some pretty deep sand. A very interesting drive is along the Yangie Track which leads you as well along beautiful 7 mile beach. we mastered this beach luckily without getting stuck. We just lowered the tyre preasure from 45 psi to 25 psi preasure in order to get better grip on the sand. We liked it that much we stayed 3 days in this beautiful park. One of the nicest we ever visited.

From here we drove along the western coast of Eyre Peninsula to Minnipa which was our planned gateway to the Gawler Ranges. On the way we visited Murphys haystack, a set of interesting granite boulders. Around Minnipa we visited the Tcharkuldu Hill with scenic granite rock formations.