The Yorke Peninsula

The Yorke Peninsula is the sort of boot-shaped peninsula near Adelaide and was another area we were eager to explore after we had to give it a miss during our 2017 trip. We didn’t know much about it other than knowing of Innes

National Park, which apparently had some interesting white-settler history, and some gorgeous beaches and lookouts. But first, it had been a while since we last showered ? And this is also a good time to tell you a little about one of the money-saving pro tips we’ve implemented over the last 7 months of the trip: the cheap shower.

These showers are usually found at truck stops, roadhouses, or community pools. They usually cost around $2 for 4 minutes of hot water, although we’ve been known to pay more when desperate, and sometimes they’re even free. Most of the time, you can have a cold shower for free, which we’ve definitely been known to do as well when we didn’t have coins handy. They vary in quality from the really nice, private, and clean, to well…you can imagine. Our favourites are the community pool showers – pay $3 to $5 at the door and go in and have a nice hot shower and pretend you’re a normal person for a bit and that you just had a swim at the pool or something – not that you’re a grubby unemployed transient with no fixed address! ?

Anyway, we were previously paying $25 – $35 or more some nights to stay in caravan parks just to make use of the showers, which sucked, because caravan parks suck and they’re expensive and it’s not exactly in the spirit of the trip to be packed in like sardines in the middle of a town somewhere.

I digress. Back to Jeep photos!

Our first campsite on the Yorke Peninsula was at the Gap, and we were introduced to the Yorke Peninsula’s clever council campground system. The council runs bush campgrounds all around the peninsula, and has an online automatic permit system. You just go onto the website and pay $10 for a bush camping permit, per night, or $50 for 7 nights. We thought that was really clever of the council. They’re providing an in-demand service for a low cost to attract tourists who can then spend their money on area businesses!

The first stop for our exploration of the Yorke Peninsula was a place called Flaherty Beach, for our morning coffee, and a bit of cooling-off in the super shallow, glassy calm waters. This beach would be great for kids or just for hanging out on one of those portable lounge chairs in the water and having a few drinks.

We drove around the peninsula for the rest of the day, stopping at various shops, pubs, and cafes, before setting up camp for the night at Innes National Park.

One of the draws of Innes National Park is the historic town of Inneston, which is the only surviving example of a 20th century gypsum mining complex. The town was abandoned after the Great Depression and is now a heritage walk inside Innes National Park.

Also on the Inneston walk is Lake Inneston, which was one of the most extreme examples of Instagram “fake news” we’ve seen on this trip. I was looking forward to a beautiful ice-blue lake and maybe a swim. Instead we were greeted with a dismal gray, dirty, muddy, smelly, gross body of water that was signed as not safe for swimming. Check out this side-by-side comparison I made:

Lots of our friends and family have asked us why we don’t try to make money travel blogging this trip. The answer is in the above….to become a popular travel blogger / photographer, you really need to work at your photos, and even fudge them a little. You need to wait for a sunny moment and probably these days you need a drone. And there are a TON of people already doing it – at least in Australia there are – and they’re much better at it than us!

Anyway, moving on – our next destination was the West Cape Lighthouse walk – a short stroll out a windy and rocky cape to the West Cape Lighthouse, with a lookout over two beautiful beaches.

Our last stop on the Yorke Peninsula was another beautiful beach, this one just around the corner from the Gap campsite from our first night here. This beach boasted an incredible (and again, Insta-famous) ocean pool, but it was a bit too cold for us to swim that day. You may have read about the record-breaking heatwave Australia just suffered, with temps of up to 48ºC and even breaking the 50’s in some places. After that heatwave, in the area we were, there was a beautiful cool change which brought temps of about 20º during the day – a welcome change but too chilly to swim in the ocean!

All in all though, the Yorke Peninsula left us wanting more. We loved the council campgrounds and the booking system. The beaches and ocean pools were numerous and not busy at all. The locals and especially the local business owners were very friendly. The scenery was gorgeous, I mean just look at this photo of our campsite on the last night (another council site) we spent on the peninsula…

But, there were a ton of biting March flies and kangaroo ticks everywhere, we had a bad experience with campers setting up close to us at one site at 10pm and hammering stakes into the (super hard) ground and then partying until 1am despite being told to knock it off, it was too hot and then too cold and too cloudy, there were numerous Instagram “fake news” experiences, and just…yeah. We are conflicted about the Yorke Peninsula. Maybe we’ll try again one day.

For now, it’s off to Adelaide, and the official completion of our circumnavigation of Australia (but not the completion of the trip)!