DAY 116 - SALT CREEK SA

SALT CREEK SA

DAY 116

MENINGIE – SALT CREEK

66.31 km

Total Time: 10.10 – 15.30 (5h 20m)

Time on Bike: 3h 57m 08s

Max. Speed: 38.7 km/h

Av. Speed: 16.8 km/h


Salt Creek is about halfway along the Coorong between Meningie and Kingston S-E.

This kind of leaves me in the middle of somewhere or nowhere at once.

For tonight, it is the Gemini Downs Camp, which has lent me a strip of grass in the wide open, untouched expanse of the Coorong.

And untouched it is, in the real sense.

If something is untouched, I am thinking this means that humans generally stay well away.

I’m not sure we can be trusted anymore.

The Coorong therefore must rate as one of Australia’s continuously untouched strips of wilderness.

The narrow mud flats and wetlands that are the Coorong lie between the wilderworld of the Southern Ocean on one side and the National B1 Princes Highway on the other.

It is a 60 kilometre channel of fragile ecosystem that outdates human existence by eons and will hopefully outlast it by about the same.

For its own sake, it is not quite physically spectacular enough to be regarded as a monster tourist hoop.

The nearby settlements are Spartan and don’t support such heavy traffic anyway, and this is the way it should stay.

Most just pass on by but to stop is fair reward with guaranteed encounters of the natural kind.

For myself, it leaves a 90 kilometre coastal run tomorrow, towards the southeast holiday coast of South Australia which will occupy me for the next few days.

The weather has reinvented itself remarkably and this afternoon was the finest display of sunny clear skies for about a month.

It goes to say that I desire for it to hold in this manner, at least for tomorrow and the exposed length of southern highway to Kingston.